Jim Cramer just told Chris Matthews that we are going to have a great retail season this Christmas. Given Cramer’s track record, I’d start preparing for a complete economic collapse somewhere around Thanksgiving, complete with people jumping from buildings, mass layoffs, hyper-inflation and bread lines.
Reader Interactions
135Comments
Comments are closed.
Trackbacks
-
[…] awesome take down, the great blabbering mouthpiece, Jim Cramer now is at it again [via Balloon Juice]: Jim Cramer just told Chris Matthews that we are going to have a great retail season this […]
-
[…] Balloon Juice: Jim Cramer just told Chris Matthews that we are going to have a great retail season this Christmas. Share/Save Category: CNBC, Crap, Market […]
-
[…] “Jim Cramer just told Chris Matthews that we are going to have a great retail season this Christmas. Given Cramer’s track record, I’d start preparing for a complete economic collapse somewhere around Thanksgiving, complete with people jumping from buildings, mass layoffs, hyper-inflation and bread lines.” – John Cole […]
General Winfield Stuck
Mad Money is Mad as a Hatter.
Violet
Would I get rich if I did exactly the opposite of what Jim Cramer says?
ronin122
@Violet: The Bill Kristol of finance?
Zifnab
@Violet: I really do want to make a fund, called the Jim Cramer Index, and just buy whatever he suggests and sell whatever he suggests.
And then short the hell out of it.
Gus
Why does anyone have that dipshit on their program?
soonergrunt
This means that I’m going to have to stock up on canned goods, a new generator, diesel fuel, candles, firewood…
stevie314159
Jesus, I hate it when Tweety equates the stimulus money aid to state and local govts as “payoffs to the mayors” and not smelling like new construction.
I guess he doesn’t care if his house catches fire or the police don’t patrol his neighborhood. And if they had to lay off some garbage collectors, then we could really talk about the smell of jobs, or no jobs.
General Winfield Stuck
@ronin122:
Jingo Jim
bago
Actually, for the Cramer Index, you would just watch whatever Cramer himself is buying and/or shorting, as he mentioned when talking about “putting stories out there” to bump his hedge fund.
linda
i swear to christ — how anyone can take either of those jackasses seriously is beyond me. cramer should be embarrassed by what he does — those friggin toys and sound effects — the stupidity is overwhelming.
calipygian
Via Felix Salmon, Jim Cramer and great moments in punditry:
Yes, Jim Cramer, student of Leninism thinks that the Dow reaching 10,000 is going to make Obama order us to shoot all the bankers.
Best part of the clip? The end:
These people aren’t aware at all why people, in Kevin Drum’s words, want to destroy Wall Street and salt the earth so nothing like it grows there again.
Incertus
If I’m lucky, I’ll spend my Christmas money going to Philadelphia for MLA and job interviews. If I’m not, well, there’s always drinking heavily.
jonas
Of course Jim Cramer thinks this. All the people he hangs out with are flush with million-dollar, taxpayer funded Wall Street bonuses and have been telling him how they’re looking forward to finally putting that second helipad on their yacht. Merry Christmas, bitches.
me
That’s nothing, Glenn Beck is reading from “Quotations from Chairman Mao”.
calipygian
I am a fair student of Soviet history myself, and IIRC Leon Trotsky was a journalist…JUST LIKE JIM CRAMER!!!
Violet
@Zifnab:
Sounds like an excellent idea. Or you could start a fund called “The Un-Jim Cramer” and just do everything exactly opposite of what he says to do.
I wonder how all those people who he told to take their money out of the market “right now” on October 6, 2008 feel now? The Dow was at 9,525 that day.
General Winfield Stuck
This just screams Upper East Side Martini with a Bubble Bath.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gus:
Gus, this is Tweety we’re talking about.
SATSQ
Brachiator
Santa Claus is probably shaking in his boots, too.
Incertus
Off topic, but this has got to be the fucked up story of the day. Sad thing is that I lived in Hammond for about ten years, and don’t find this surprising in the least.
bayville
This is part of Cramer’s covert War on Christmas.
Last time Cramer made the news was two weeks ago.
Zerohedge was on top of the collateral damage here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/jim-cramers-recommendation-cit-yesterday-primed-upside-i-would-buy
khead
No, no. It just means a mild turndown.
Now, if Jim Glassman had said all that…..
MikeJ
He ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
calipygian
@Incertus: @Incertus: Yup. And after the federal suit is filed and won, Rush will wail about federal intervention into a local issue.
No, nothing to do with race. Everything to do with federalism.
Alan
It irks me Jim Cramer is even allowed on television. All he is is a mouthpiece for everything that’s wrong with our financial system. Sure everything will be peachy this Christmas. Because all his friends are no longer in pain. They’re flush with federal money. Let’s keep this house of cards erected. Otherwise, Obama would be destroying wealth.
Zifnab
I like how Cramer breezes through this little history lesson without ever really addressing the salient points. Simply poo-pooing the Russian Revolution as a failure doesn’t make the emotions that drove it go away. And you only have to look at the Tea Party Brigades to see a group of little Trotskys ready to through somebody up against a wall.
He also likes to blissfully overlook how Communist Russia went from backwater aristocracy to globe-spanning Super Power over a mere decade. Maybe he needs to reread his history books but while 1988 Communist Russia wasn’t looking so hot, no one was brushing off the USSR thirty years earlier.
Why doesn’t anyone read history as, “Lenin nationalized the banks, killed all the bankers, and had the country rolling in nukes by 1950?” Because then killing all the banksters might sound like a great idea.
Leelee for Obama
@Brachiator: I wonder if the elves have applied for stimulus money yet? I’m sure they’ll qualify somehow-if nothing else, the psychological lift most people get from the holidays is worth supporting.
General Winfield Stuck
@me:
Beck is just pining for a Wingnut Cultural Revolution. Who will be the Gang of Four?
Jacy
@Incertus:
Good grief — I have two kids at SLU in Hammond; we live in the parish. I so hate this fucking state. Sigh.
I swear there are just no holes deep enough to bury some people in.
PattyP
Does that mean I can get a really cheap brand name LCD teevee?
Zifnab
@Violet:
Probably the same way they felt on October 6, 2008. Stupid. Admittedly, now they probably feel a lot poorer.
Midnight Marauder
@Incertus:
Yeah, I just read that article a little bit ago. My whole family on both sides is pretty much Louisiana people, through and through, so reading about that asshat judge wasn’t the least bit surprising. I do hope that THE MOTHERFUCKING FURY gets unleashed on him, though. If it does, it certainly won’t be coming at the state level, with Mayor
Kenneth The PageBobby at the helm.It was pretty sweet listening to him get booed in New Orleans earlier when Obama mentioned his name.
Heh, indeed.
SiubhanDuinne
O/T but here is a new meme to watch: Obama is “obnoxiously articulate.” (I am now taking a deep breath to see what happens when I try to link to the story.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-melber/ap-asks-if-obama-is-obnox_b_322256.html
(I have no idea what is going to happen with that “code” tag; this is a test. In case it goes all pfloooey, here’s the complete link. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-melber/ap-asks-if-obama-is-obnox_b_322256.html)
kindness
Maybe we can get The Daily Show to book him again….
Singularity
Okay, but how do we know it won’t work here if we never even try it?
Chad N Freude
@calipygian: And your evidence for the claim that Cramer is a journalist?
calipygian
I wonder what Cramer would think of Greenspan coming out today and saying, “If they are too big to fail, they are too big…chop ’em up”.
Probably call Greenspan a Leninist.
jl
There are periodic noises coming out of the my radio that last few weeks that seem to advertize a new Cramer product. You can sign up for a free trial. Supposedly you get advance news on Cramers portfolio moves over the intertube e-mail.
There is a Cramer voice over in it, and he sounds unhinged.
I guess you can sign up for a free trial, and then go long or short on, or boycott, curse, or something or other, whatever company’s stocks he is trading.
The commercial sounds very goofy. I keep thinking that it was a nightmare or an hallucination, that such a goofy thing could not happen, then I hear it again.
Anyone else heard it?
I hope some one else has heard it, otherwise maybe I shouild get a check-up. If next time it seems like it is coming out my fillings, then I will see a doctor right away.
Chad N Freude
@Incertus: This happened in the United States? In the 21st century? This is the inspiration for a new sci fi TV series: Flash Backward.
jl
Just thought that in some cases, proper response to hearing that Cramer is trading a company might be to pray for it. I forgot that angle.
Unless it is a big bank.
Chad N Freude
Cramer gives blithering idiocy a bad name. Not to mention Soviet Studies.
Mark S.
@Incertus:
Pure insanity. It reminds me of this case, where some district court judge found:
Bob L
Crammer is clearly just concerned about what is best for communists and peasants.
General Winfield Stuck
OT
This is procedural but an important step in paving way for the Senate to use Reconciliation Process to pass health care reform. Any tax changes have to start with House Passage and has to be structured in a certain way from the House to allow the Senate to consider it as budget related. I don’t understand all the arcane procedures, but this is the first step and the wingnuts are already going apeshit.
inkadu
@Incertus: I was torn about how to “rate” that story. Are people rating it highly because they are cheering on the JP or are they rating it highly because they want the story to get exposure? I am in the latter camp.
I wonder how old Bardwell is. Maybe he was practicing in 1963 before the court ruled on it and is now having flashback alzheimers.
In other news, a balloon was flying around aimlessly, apparently pushed around by something called wind, rising in something called the atmosphere. More news on this developing story after this.
LD50
It’s very simple. The JP simply doesn’t want the couple’s children* to grow up to be discriminated against by assholes like himself.
*It goes without saying the couple cannot have children without getting married.
inkadu
@calipygian: Said Jim Cramer: “Lenin also said we should draw and quarter the bankers, ‘chopping them up,’ in effect. The former libertarian treasury secretary is following a dangerous road.”
Ever notice how EVERYONE gets more liberal when they retire from Washington? Conservative ideas only thrive when people are being pumped full of cash for believing them.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Fixed.
inkadu
@Chad N Freude: Tsk. And Soviet Studies was still recovering from Condoleeza Rice.
Napoleon
@Incertus:
I just saw that. Jesus, the right in this country have decided they really have to drag us back to 1957 right now.
feebog
I’ll bring the pitchforks, you bring the torches…
Stefan
The JP simply doesn’t want the couple’s children* to grow up to be discriminated against like assholes like himself.
But doesn’t he have a point? After all, look at an interracial child like Obama — would anyone want their child to suffer the discrimination that Obama is now suffering at the hands of Fox News and the Teabaggers? Far better for Obama to never have been born…..
Which suddenly makes me imagine a series of Teabagginator movies, about Teabaggers sent back in time to kill Obama’s mother and prevent his birth. Except they screw it up, of course, because they all send themselves back to 1963 Kenya rather than Hawaii…..
sistermoon
Off topic, but what the f*** is up with Ariana Huffington?
She’s on Ed Schultz, and began by going off on Ed for covering the boy in the balloon story. Now she’s on a rant about how Joe Biden should resign if more troops are sent to Afghanistan.
I swear, she’s coming across as unhinged as Orly Taitz.
slag
So…does this mean we’re winning the War on Xmas? Or losing? I always get those two confused.
Cain
So, if the christmas season crashes and burns is it still the Bush economy? What will Neil Cavuto say?
cain
Chad N Freude
@Stefan: That has an excess of WIN.
Cain
@Napoleon:
Dibs on a ’57 Chevy convertible.
cain
slag
@sistermoon:
I read that column. And she had a point. Which is that, if Biden believes that pushing on in Afghanistan is wrong and that people are going to die in the wrong war, he should resign rather than whinge about it after the fact. It was actually a pretty reasonable statement. Assuming wrongful death is something to resign over, that is.
schrodinger's cat
@Cain: Any plans for Diwali this weekend?
Mnemosyne
@Incertus:
I was half expecting it to have happened here in California since there was a lot of talk about how clerks should be allowed to decide who does and doesn’t get a marriage license while gay marriage was still legal.
LD50
Beautiful. I can just see their chagrin as they’re told by the locals “Barack Obama? He’s been in America the last few years.”
Of course, they would just conclude that even back in ’61, the Conspiracy was already up and running.
edsaid
I also noticed that Cramer neglected to mention Guaranty Trust and the Federal Reserve, among other American money institutions, helped finance the Russian Revolution so they could pick the bones of the new, unstable state. The amoral mercenaries of Wall street are nothing new.
TimO
The only liberal radio station in Phoenix just started running “Jim Cramer’s stock tips” ads. It was right before the Randi Rhodes show so I thought it was one of her comedy bits.
It wasn’t. FML.
lamh31
OT, but this is post-racial America ya’ll.
I’m from Louisiana (NOLA) to be exact (katrina refugee’ representin’). This is an embarassment for the state of Louisiana.
Interracial couple denied marriage license in Lousiana. It’s not 2009 everywhere.
But hey, the little boy in the balloon is a bigger story.
freelancer (itouch)
@sistermoon:
You say that like she was ever ‘hinged’ in the first place.
Napoleon
@Cain:
I get Sophia Loren, you can have the car.
linda
@calipygian:
that’s interesting… i do wonder if greenspan isnt feeling a tad remorseful for his part in this mess; unlike everyone else on the national stage.
Chad N Freude
@sistermoon: I haven’t seen her on Schultz’s program so I don’t know what she said on camera, but she does have a more or less rational, logical argument at the HuffPost. It’s not just “Biden should resign if …” but more “If Biden really wants to demonstrate commitment to the principles he’s expressed (which she approves of), …”
jl
Been a weird few days with weird news. Prospect of mass revolt of deluded righteous wrath and benighted bile over NFL (the league) and NFL (No Football Limbaugh) unsettling.
Need a pic of T * N * H soon, to stiffen our resolve.
Origuy
@Stefan: Funny you should mention that: this week’s Slowpoke comic.
lamh31
Okay,
sorry, this is OT too, but what the hell AP:
A.P. Asks if Obama is “obnoxiously articulate”
Man, Black people can’t catch a break. First ya’ll tell us to stop speaking Ebonics, learn proper English. So then we do, and now ya’ll wonder if we are “obnoxiously articulate”
WTF!!!
Origuy
Oh, the boy wasn’t in the balloon at all. They found him hiding in a box in the attic.
arguingwithsignposts
I saw that Cramer segment sitting in a dentist’s chair and just about spit out the drill. What a moron. I haven’t read any economics blogs or thinkers who claim we’re going to have a great christmas. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
slag
@lamh31: Ho-ly shit.
I’m sorry, but is there anything wrong with journalism that Sprinkles Sidoti doesn’t embody to a cartoonish extent?
lamh31
I heard about he kid, glad he is okay, but I have to ask, did they check the house before they claimed he was in the balloon, or before they initiated the “manhunt”.
Just askin’
arguingwithsignposts
@jl:
Fixed that one for ya.
MikeJ
If it were an adult rather than a six year old I’d say the appropriate tune now would be SNL’s “Dick in a Box”.
Chad N Freude
@lamh31: OMG. She rags on Obama for articulating his goals, which makes him obnoxious, a month after ragging on him for not articulating his vision, which makes him unfit to lead. She says he’s in the media too much and acknowledges that there is no evidence for this. This woman should marry Jim Cramer. It would be a match made in Daily Show Heaven.
jl
@lamh31: About the only part of the movie V for Vendetta (did I get the title right?) that I liked was scenes of the citizens watching the mass media with complete disbelief, disgust, and contempt. But I assumed that was fictional and could never happen. We may have natural experiment soon.
Mnemosyne
@sistermoon:
Considering that CNN (and probably other “news” networks) just spent three hours closely tracking an empty balloon, I think I’d go off on the nearest journalist, too.
Of course, I apparently have magical powers since I predicted immediately that the kid was hiding in the house because he knew he would get in trouble for messing with the balloon. Hell, I even said he was in the attic — maybe CNN should have interviewed me for my astonishing insights into this major, breaking story.
General Winfield Stuck
@lamh31:
Well, he never live up the GWB standard.
Cain
@schrodinger’s cat:
No plans in particular. My in-laws are around so we might make a nice meal and drink scotch. I would burst some firecrackers but I didn’t buy any during 4th of July.
sri
Badtux
I do expect this holiday shopping season to be better than last year’s holiday shopping season, but only in the same way as chicken pox is better than smallpox. It’s still going to be miserable as hell, and Cramer needs to lay off the crack, yeesh!
Chad N Freude
@Mnemosyne: Since you are now predicting, shouldn’t you change your screen name to Enysomenm?
All right, it’s really weak, but I am compelled to do these things.
Cain
@Napoleon:
No worries, I had my eye on Raquel Welch anyways. Note my 57 chevy comment was on comment…wait for it.. 57! Word.
cain
General Winfield Stuck
It was only a matter of time until we had a Balloon Boy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@calipygian:
Somehow I can’t quite imagine Jim Cramer reading French novels during Poliburo meetings, or anyone accusing Jim Cramer of being guilty of “excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative aspects of his work”.
inkadu
@Mnemosyne: And looking at the balloon, it didn’t look like it really carry a six-year-old as high and as far as it went.
Hey, at least there was a kid.
I was amused how the TV continued to cover the story for an hour after the balloon landed, no kid was found, and the justification for this being news collapsed. It was on mute, of course — all i saw were multiple shots of the balloon flying across the colorado plains — but I doubt they were discussing health care reform.
ericblair
@Badtux: It’s still going to be miserable as hell, and Cramer needs to lay off the crack, yeesh!
I’m just assuming that Cramer has a bunch of turd retailer stocks he needs to dump. All of these monkeys just talk their books all day on CNBC. Otherwise, what’s the point?
eemom
Here’s a good one: Orrin Hatch is gonna kick him some……..teeth.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_10/020456.php
I love the sound of wingnuts cracking in the autumn.
Comrade Jake
I don’t have any problem with Cramer per se. What I have a major problem with is that he’s taken as A VERY SERIOUS PERSON WHO KNOWS ABOUT THE MARKET.
He was on The Today Show almost every morning last fall during the collapse, Meredith Viera seemingly hanging on his every word. That kind of nonsense is what kills you.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@General Winfield Stuck:
We really ought to adopt him as a blog mascot. I can’t think of a better metaphor for US politics than an unsupervised little kid releasing a bizarre flying jackalope which panics local law enforcement, totally dominates the news media, scares the crap out of his family, and then the story finally ends in comedy as he’s found hiding in a box in the garage. Future historians will regard this story as the Rosetta Stone of our era.
Shawn in ShowMe
Well her published article does go on and on but I really can’t argue with the logic behind it. Getting Afghanistan/Pakistan right is the linchpin of our national security policy, it’s an issue that Biden has been very passionate about even before Obama took office and I would put his foreign policy experience against anybody that is currently advising Obama.
It would be refreshing to see a government official draw a line in the sand over an issue this important instead of writing a mea culpa book after the fact. Faced with having to choose publicly between a man he probably trusts more than anybody in the Cabinet and General Jones, I have to believe Obama would side with Biden.
Uloborus
Um… just a little note from my own background studying Soviet history, which I found quite fascinating.
Lenin turned the collapsed Russian economy around and built a massive industrial base that catapulted it into the first world basically out of nothing.
The Soviet economic mess we’re familiar with is the result of Stalin purging the educated and intellectuals, particularly engineers, literally in the millions, sending the system Lenin built down in flames.
Lenin was far from a perfect man – but his Communism didn’t fail. It was violently derailed by politics before it was fully tested.
Mao’s Communism failed. Oy.
Midnight Marauder
@Shawn in ShowMe:
Absolutely. I don’t think there’s anyway Obama would/could let Biden resign in this political environment. Certainly not anywhere before the end of the year, at least, prior to HCR being completed. Talk about everything going to hell in a handbasket…
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Uloborus:
This is bullshit. Even Roy Medvedev in “Let History Judge” doesn’t go that far, and he’s a flat out Lenin apologist. The dynamism of the pre-revolutionary Tsarist economy is well documented, as is the difficultly which the Bolsheviks encountered just bringing the economy back to pre-war levels of productivity. It is also well documented that Lenin regarded the NEP as only a temporary concession to capitalism and had every intention of revoking it. The Germans picked a fight with Tsarist Russia in 1914 for a very good reason – because all the economic forecasts were pointing towards “we will bury you” territory if they waited any longer, and both they and the Russians knew it. It wasn’t the communists who industrialized Russia – it was going to happen anyway, albeit on a different schedule and without the forced capitalization and reinvestment via starvation of the peasantry and confiscation of their wealth which occurred under Stalin.
Anne Laurie
@Stefan:
I’m thinking a vehicle for Adam Sandler, Jim Carey, Seth Rogan and Gerard Butler. Of course it’ll suck diseased elephant balls, but at least it should keep a few no-talent morons busy for a few years. And if the tigers in the big Kenyan Safari climax get loose and eat the “talent”, well, darn!
(I know there are no tigers in Kenya, but the macho Sandler/Carey/Rogan/Butler team would absolutely demand the larger, flashier, cooler predators. For xtra laffs!
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
When that darned activist judge approved gay marriage here in Massachusetts, there was a metric shiteton of concern-trolling about how deeply religious clerks were going to be forced to choose between their beliefs and their jobs. And yet for some reason no stories seemed to have surfaced in the local news concerning such terrible, terrible dilemmas during the five years since then, which cannot be for lack of trying by our valiant godsbotherer-loving media.
Right Wing Extreme
What The Chosen One isn’t going to save us. Drat and other comments.
me
Gee, so many choices. Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart, Erick Erickson, Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg (maybe not), Bernard Goldberg, Andrew McCarthy, Orly Taitz, Dan Riehl, Robert McCain.
ChristianPinko
@Memnosyne:
Try dressing like a pimp.
In re the interracial marriage case: Another Balloon Juicer here calling in from Hammond. Yeesh, what an embarrassment that JP is. At least most of the comments in the Hammond Daily Star are running against him.
inkadu
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I actually no almost nothing of Russian history, but I have a direct question and a meta question. Meta question first:
Given that Soviet Studies in the United States was so largely driven by cold war anxiety, combined with McArthyist paranoia, was it really possible to have an academic discussion about Russia? Wouldn’t the overwhelming tendency be to make Russia out as both more powerful and at the same time communism less efficient? All the soviet scholars in the United States seem to completely miss the internal collapse of the soviet union, and every one since then crows about how Reagan brought them down — as if communism were something that wouldn’t collapse under its own inevitable corruption. So I take anything from a soviet scholar with a grain of salt, since I imagine the field is choc-a-bloc with cold war Reaganites with shared self-reinforced biases.
Real question: If, as you say, Lenin merely quickened industrialization, he did so under difficult conditions — a broken military, collapsed economy, and social upheaval involving liquidation of the ruling class. If the best you can do to minimize Lenin’s accomplishment is to say, “It would have happened anyway, but it would have taken more time,” I think your case must be rather weak.
Chad N Freude
@Anne Laurie: That could be almost as good as “Tropic Thunder”!
General Winfield Stuck
@Right Wing Extreme:
This is slim pickens. You have to give us more to work with.
CalD
Note to self: Buy retail stocks in early January.
Chad N Freude
@Anne Laurie: Proves nothing. Obviously, the hundreds of tragic cases that ensued would not be reported by the Liberal Media.
BombIranForChrist
I just bought 600 lbs of beans and toilet paper. I am ready for Armageddon.
General Winfield Stuck
@BombIranForChrist:
Well, at least you sobered up, Don’t light no matches though.
Ruckus
@Badtux:
Anyone predicting a strong Xmas retail season should be checked out for smoking crack. Nobody that I know with a small retail business, myself included, is predicting an even respectable recovery for a least a year. And maybe more. I’m going to go out on a limb here (this limb would probably hold up that SUV that no one is buying) but I don’t think we’ve seen all the bottoms this recession has. Let alone the recovery end of the curve.
Chuck Butcher
@inkadu:
A lot of smart people watched that balloon without noting that the ballast of a 6 yr old wasn’t keeping the bottom centered down and later the helium centered in the balloon.
I have no idea what makes anyone think that the Holiday shopping is going to be worth squat. It might be better than last one but I don’t have any confidence in that. If Holiday shopping crashes watch for bad things in commercial real estate.
The Moar You Know
@Right Wing Extreme: It’s always cute to see baby trolls take their first, tenative steps.
Chad N Freude
@Right Wing Extreme: Dude, I just read your Ten Commandments parody. Aside from mocking one of the foundations of Judaism and Christianity, it is so easy to turn the jokes back on the party of the money changers in the Temple. If I get really bored later, I may post a full rewrite. But for now, just a teaser:
Dean Wormer
@calipygian:
Préparez vos ice-axes, non?
ricky
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Did the Kaiser get his forecasts from Jim Cramer or were the two of you in the same Master’s program?
inkadu
@Chuck Butcher: A lot of smart people… maybe it’s not smarts that keep people stupid but social decency.
I remember when the story broke of the black man carjacking a white woman in the middle of whitesville with her two white children in the back of the car. I called bullshit on the story almost instantly and was met with looks of horror by everyone around me. “How could you say that? The woman lost her children! What the hell is wrong with you?”
I imagine being on television makes you especially averse (or pre-selects you) to saying things that might temporarily shock the social conscience.
I didn’t really watch the coverage; news anchors are usually empty-headed morons with nice hair. But in this case, there is actually someone in almost every studio with experience on weather balloons — meteorologists. I wonder if any of them were consulted, if any of them had suspicions, and if any of them are kicking themselves for missing what might have been obvious.
Here’s to a dead thread.
All hail Marx and Lennon.
LD50
@Right Wing Extreme: Dude, you’re just mailing it in. Be more clever. God knows you can’t get by here on your personality.
Shinobi
I just quit my job running forecasts for the retail industry.
Jim Cramer is wrong, as usual. The only reason the numbers don’t look completely dismal (traffic has been down over 10% for most of the year) right now is because we are comparing to post crash figures.
Things don’t look as bad, but we’re not talking about good.
inkadu
@Shinobi: The way the news go, retail sales will be up in December from November, hence… RECOVERY!
4jkb4ia
Where does he get that!? Per NYT retailers will be happy to have the same sales as last year!
4jkb4ia
@Right Wing Extreme:
This is a particularly talentless troll.
TenguPhule
Ironically, this is perhaps the best idea Cramer has ever had.
TenguPhule
Fixed!
raptusregaliter
“Barron’s” actually ran a story a couple of years ago about how the best way to make money off Jim Cramer is to short his picks. It’s called “shorting the bump,” and what you’re doing is taking advantage of the imbeciles who temporarily drive up the price of Cramer’s picks.
If you’re a newbie investor, DO NOT listen to Cramer! You will lose your shirt.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@inkadu:
Good question. The answer, and a surprising one at that, is that from roughly the mid 1960s and on scholarship in the field of Sovietology and Russian studies was pretty good. The reasons were two fold – first, we had an incentive to try to get it right when the USSR was an actual competitor and threat to the US, and secondly there was a good deal of anti-Cold Warrior historical revisionism and contrarian argument even then, especially during the period when the Vietnam War was energizing anti-imperialism in the US. Since 1991 various Soviet era archive have been opened in Russia itself and so we’ve had a chance to see how well the pre-1991 scholarship is holding up vs. the new information which has become available since then. The area where we did the worst was in evaluating Soviet military capabilities and intentions (surprise, surprise!), whereas the macro-economic and political history from before 1991 has held up pretty well.
What hasn’t held up well is the Good Lenin – Bad Stalin meme which I was shooting down. That canard has been circulating in the West at least since Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Party Congress was leaked, if not sooner. At lot of solid historical literature of the last 20-30 years has established that the continuities of political policy in the USSR from the early 20s to the early 30s, especially at the local level and in the area of the political repression (which the Stalin era would become notorious for) were greater than we had previously thought and that the idea that Lenin, if he had lived longer, would have ruled over a more humane society in the latter period is extremely implausible.
The problem is that industrial takeoff in the USSR did not happen under Lenin, or even under the collective leadership during the mid 1920s. The USSR did not recover to pre-1914 levels of industrial output until roughly 1928 (take a look for example at the tables of output in Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp 199-202, and the sources he cites). While some of this can be blamed on the chaos and destruction of the First World War and the Civil War (as if Lenin has no share of blame for the latter), industrial performance was also hampered after 1920 by a lack of capital to invest in infrastructure, by bad policy formulated by Sovnarkom under Lenin’s guidance, and by the early stages of what would later become the “anti-wrecking” campaign in which so-called “bourgeois specialists” (i.e. engineers and other folks with a technical education) were repressed as enemies of the state out of political paranoia and as scapegoats for the poor performance of the Soviet economy.
The massive building of industry in the USSR was an accomplishment under Stalin during the 1930s and was financed by the massive and historically almost unprecedented repression of gross domestic consumption levels which were part and parcel of the liquidation of the Kulaks and the collectivization of agriculture. If somebody wants to argue that on that basis Stalinism was justified, then we are in a different and even more malevolent discussion. But I thought we were arguing Lenin’s dubious legacy here, and the industrial development of the USSR was not something which happened under his leadership or even as a latent consequence after his death of his economic policies.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@inkadu:
I just posted a lengthy comment responding to some interesting and well posed questions by inkadu, which unfortunately is stuck in moderation. I would appreciate it if one of the bloghosts would release it. Thanks!
twiffer
@ SiubhanDuinne & lahm31: it pains me to no end to know there is even a concept of “obnoxiously articulate”. i suppose it’s akin to someone being just too damn intelligent.
remember when “elite” used to just mean the best? when it was a positive? when being well-spoken, intelligent and educated was considered laudable? what a bitter people we must be to consantly ascribe negative connotation to the very qualities we should aspire to cultivate.
Bill Jones
As long as the people jumping from buildings are doing it on Wall St. the rest is a price I’m willing to pay.
stickler
ThatLeftTurnInABQ –
Stalin’s industrialization was horrific indeed for the Soviet people. But without the factories, how would they have stopped Hitler?
Stalin’s 1931-era paranoia about the malevolent West seems rather less paranoid given what would come in 1941.
Right Wing Extreme
@General Winfield Stuck: Guess I am just not feeling it lately.
Right Wing Extreme
@LD50: been sick dude. hard to be witty when you are still feeling like hammered dog doo.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Right Wing Extreme:
First of all, no matter how sick you are you have to be witty in the first place. Admit it, you’re just sick. No wit, just shit.
;)
It’s hard to believe that anyone would ever take Cramer seriously after the total humiliation and evisceration of him and his ‘craft’ on The Daily Show.
My wife works in retail at a big box store and sales are in the dumpster, they are cutting hours and cutting corners everywhere. We shudder to think what the next insurance ‘offer’ they will make next month. Every November they slice another chunk of benefits off, raise premiums and deductibles and tell the employees to take it or leave it.
In over fifteen years of coverage, we have never spent more than we paid into our plans. Not even close. But we sure have had a lot of denials and reductions (which we are on the hook for the balance of).
The insurance companies are doing quite well I hear. Gee, I wonder why.
Right Wing Extreme
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal): fair enough, but who said I bought Cramer’s bullshit in the first place? I sympathize with your wife. I used to work for a self insured hotel chain, and all we got was higher premiums, and less service. It was bull shit. I dislike big box stores and only shop there when I have no choice. One thing I agree with you libs on is shopping at the mom & pop local shop. There NO option where I live for groceries unless it is picking which is less evil between Safeway, Wally-World or Albertson’s, but hardware and the like, I pay the premium to shop at the local True-Value, which is three blocks away, rather than drive the forty mile round trip to the Home Depot unless I must. Even though for a big order it is still cheaper even after gas. Despite my dislike for box stores, I will say this for them, they at least, for the most part, offer some form of insurance to their employees, though the girl I dated years ago who worked for Wally-World said it sucked. The mom & pop can’t afford it.