Back when Jim Cramer was an active hedge-fund trader, rather than an on-air fit-thrower for CNBC, he kept his distance from TheStreet.com, lest the site be accused of advancing his portfolio. No such distance now: He's replacing Thomas Clarke as chairman. Clarke remains CEO. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Jim Cramer now has more to worry about that just the horrifically lousy stock market predictions he's been doling out to naive investors. He'll now have to figure out how to revive his sagging financial news site, TheStreet.com, too. Although the financial crisis has led to a boost in traffic—the company reported that the number of visitors to the site was up 27 percent during the third quarter—the finance portal "missed sales estimates, posted a surprise loss, and shook up its boardroom," replacing the company's current chairman with Cramer himself. That should solve everything! [SAI]

Jim Cramer is apologizing once again. No, not for recommending Bear Stearns days before its collapse, or suggesting investors buy stock in Wachovia just days before it took a tumble, too. He's saying sorry to the 115,000 AIG employees he insulted late last week, comments that led AIG's CEO to fire off a nasty letter to Cramer yesterday. [BusinessSheet]

♦ Lawmakers and officials are moving close to ironing out a second stimulus bill after Fed chair Ben Bernanke endorsed the idea. [Bloomberg, NYT]
♦ The Treasury Department is pushing bigger banks to use the rescue package to acquire smaller, weaker rivals. [NYT]
♦ The Dow's 413-point rise yesterday was attributed to signs the credit market is beginning to thaw. [NYT]
♦ Some people are still making out nicely: Peter Kraus, the head of strategy at Merrill, will be leaving the firm after just a couple of months with as much as $25 million. [WSJ]

♦ Judy Miller is joining Fox News as a contributor. [WaPo]
♦ David Carr chats with lousy market prognosticator Jim Cramer, who concedes that it's "a completely humbling market," but won't apologize for suggesting everyone take their money out of the market. [NYT]
♦ Jeff Zucker says NBC will cut $500 million from its 2009 budget. [Reuters]
♦ Jeff Probst has a new show in the works: Live Like You're Dying will feature Probst taking a terminally-ill person on "the last adventure of their life." [EW]
♦ A report on the mood at the Frankfurt Book Fair. [NYO]
♦ Rick Yorn has left the the Hollywood management powerhouse the Firm. [Variety]
♦ Max Payne was the No. 1 movie at the box office this weekend, racking up $18 million in ticket sales. [LAT]

Jim Cramer, CNBC's chief stock shouter and generally erratic personality, has at least one thing going for him: he owns up to his mistakes. Which are legion! It makes him a more sympathetic figure than he would be if he gave equally bad advice without appearing close to tears so often. But Cramer also stands by his advice that may yet prove to be wrong. Earlier this month he told everyone to yank all their money for the next five years out of the market. “It was one of the greatest calls of my life,” he told the NYT today. “And I’ve been pilloried for it.” Really? So far, Cramer's been "pilloried" more for the calls that he definitively got wrong, and for being a huge bull in general right up until the bottom fell out of the market. The reaction to his "pull your money out" rant was more slack-jawed amazement at how he could totally flip his entire investment philosophy without blinking. And, you know, at how he was about to cry. He may turn out to be right! We'll see in five years. I guess you can't expect him to know what the public thinks:

Jim Cramer should really consider renegotiating his contracts with CNBC and New York magazine: If the drop in the stock market really had him worried about how he'd pay college tuition for his two daughters, perhaps he should consider approaching CNBC chief Mark Hoffman or New York editor-in-chief Adam Moss about a raise? Something tells us that no matter what happens in the markets, the former money manager and TheStreet.com co-founder won't be filling out financial aid applications in the near future. But what a clever way to relate to the middle-aged women turning into the View!

♦ Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson says the paper's newsstand sales have risen 20 percent in the last few weeks. [Portfolio]
♦ Fox Business is keeping up its attack on CNBC's Jim Cramer. [NYP]
♦ Comedian D.L. Hughley has signed on to host a show on CNN. [Variety]
♦ Colin Callender, the president of HBO Films, is leaving by the end of the year to start his own entertainment production company. [NYT]
♦ The Atlantic has launched a redesign and a new ad campaign. [AdFreak]
♦ Indian author Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger. [Time]
♦ The National Book Award nominees for fiction and non-fiction are in. [NYO, NYO]

Jim Cramer has changed his mind! Just last week, you may recall, the shouty CNBC stock picker appeared close to tears as he begged Americans to pull all the cash they'd need for the next five years out of the crippled stock market. Well, whatever, that was last week. Now he says that we've already reached "the beginning of the end of the crisis." That sure was fast! This, of course, is in line with his (physical and intellectual) penchant for wild gesticulation. Let's take a brief look back at Mr. Cramer's unpredictable recent past, shall we?

Last week Jim Cramer set off a firestorm when he appeared on the Today show and recommended that investors take every penny they'd need for the next five years out of the market at once. If you were foolish enough to heed Cramer's advice and you sold your holdings late last week, you would have missed out of yesterday's historic rally, of course, proving once again that Cramer's track record predicting the markets is about as distinguished as George Bush's record charting the war in Iraq. But it gets better. Instead of owning up to his mistakes or simply suggesting his advice may have been a bit rash, he's changed his tune once again. According to Cramer, we've reached "the beginning of the end of the crisis." Video after the jump.

Fox Business Network is so happy for this whole Wall Street meltdown thing. Why just recently they finally got an audience that's actually big enough to measure! But even if you agree with many economic experts that Fox Business Network is the financial news equivalent of The Learning Annex, you have to admire their plucky use of ads to snipe at CNBC. They have a new one about how wrong Jim Cramer has been about everything involving money! Which is factually true. Here it is:

♦ Sumner Redstone is being forced to sell about one-fifth of his stake in CBS and Viacom to meet the terms of various loan agreements. Also: Shares in Viacom plunged after the company announced third-quarter earnings fell short of estimates. [Bloomberg]
♦ It's official: Hearst's Cathie Black announced CosmoGirl will fold. [Portfolio]
♦ A little perspective: Time Warner is now less than one-quarter of what AOL alone was worth before the merger. [SAI]
♦ After much drama (and a few leaked emails), Scott Rudin has decided to talk away from The Reader. [THR]

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

Whoa, Jim Cramer has fully turned around as much as a man can possibly turn around! The shouty CNBC (poor) stock picker—who as recently as last November was trumpeting "10 Reasons to Be Bullish" ("1. The stock market is cheap")—went on the Today show this morning to virtually beg Americans to pull all the money they might need in the next five years out of the stock market, no matter what the cost. He looks like he's about to cry. This will be one of the defining moments in the media narrative of our nation's impending financial doom. Click to watch an emotional money man embrace his inner Bear.

Jim Cramer turned up on the Today show this morning and dropped his usual TV persona—that of a raving maniac—to weigh in the market and offer up a little advice. So what does Jim suggest you do now that the economy is in a tailspin? "Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week," he tells Ann Curry. Of course given his track record, you may want to consider doing precisely the opposite and pouring all of money in the market this afternoon. [MSNBC via Dealbreaker]

So it turns out that the same night James Cramer was bragging about foretelling the Wall Street meltdown he was in the midst of a colossal fuckup. The CNBC host on September 15 recommended shares of Wachovia as a safe haven from the financial panic. Cramer took comfort in the words his former Goldman Sachs boss Robert Steel, who earlier in the show said his company Wachovia had "a great future." "You're a reassuring face," Cramer told him. In between, a CNBC promo promised "Fast, accurate, actionable, unbiased" advice. Wachovia of course went to liquidate at $1 per share Monday, less than a tenth of its value when Cramer recommended the stock. Cramer quickly apologized Monday night. "I wasn't skeptical enough," he said. It's all in the video after the jump.

Remember when Jim Cramer recommended buying stock in Wachovia a couple of weeks ago? Yea, neither do we. But just in case the dozen or so examples of how embarrassingly misguided Jim Cramer usually is don't suffice (remember his enthusiastic support for Bear Stearns just before its collapse?) and you need further proof that taking financial advice from a cable news show isn't such a hot idea, feel free to take a moment to watch Cramer's overly dramatic apology from last night's broadcast of Mad Money. Two weeks ago Cramer welcomed Wachovia CEO Robert Steel to the show, who told the manic talk show host that his bank was doing great, prompting Cramer to describe Wachovia a "winner." We all now how that "winner" turned out, although Cramer seems to have already formulated his defense. He claims that Steel, a longtime pal, took "advantage" of him. Funny, that sounds familiar!

Everyone wants to figure out what happened to the market last fortnight! Which is why the week of September 14 marked the highest ratings in CNBC's nineteen year history, the New York Times reported today in a story about how people keep tuning in to the business news network looking for answers on What It All Means only to get hooked because CNBC anchors have no idea What It All Means. It is all just moving so goddamn fast! (Like um, while I was getting a picture for this post, the House voted down the bailout package, what do you know…) Between the squawking and spinning and bank failing, no one had a chance to acknowledge the real ideological shift underway among just about everyone who bothers thinking about that sort of crap. Listicle time again! I read all the deep, probing stories over the weekend about What Actually Happened And Who Profited Off That so you wouldn't have to.1. "Profit" is kind of a scam. Profit, as they say in the business, is the "bottom line."* But when every financial institution in America can follow a decade of unprecedented "profits" with the threat of Universal Abject Ruin, you have to conclude the whole damn "bottom line" is bullshit. Yesterday the NYT ran a story about an obscure unit of the insurance company AIG that generated shitloads of profits in the boom years. It generated shitloads of profits because it sold "credit default swaps." Credit-default swaps protect the principal paid on a bond in the case of a default. AIG made shitloads selling them in the boom years because a lot of other guys on Wall Street were making shitloads of money rolling up mortgages into bonds, and a guy from Morgan Stanley called up a guy at AIG named Joseph Cassano, told him about these rolled-up mortgage security deals, and asked if AIG would be interested in getting into the business of insuring these mortgages in much the same way AIG insured the houses said mortgages had been taken out to buy. Because Morgan Stanley would totally buy that insurance! Goldman Sachs would also be interested. A few crafty hedge fund guys were interested too. Later that "interest" would yield a profit bonanza for the guys who were smart enough to load up on them! But first the profit bonanza's was AIG's. By 2005, this unit of AIG generated three and a quarter billion dollars revenue. And you know what the operating profit margin on that revenue was? Fucking 83%. Eighty-three percent. That is after they paid everyone's salary and Blackberry bills and sleeper-class airfares and five-star hotel rooms and for all their office supplies. AIG shared the wealth with employees more, of course. At the end of the day people who worked in that unit brought home between a third and 44% of revenue. Forty-four percent!!! That is literally unreal. Isn't the whole point of having an "insurance" company that you save money like that to have on hand for disaster? What sort of insurance company makes an record-breaking profit the same year they're on the hook over a billion dollars for a record-breaking natural disaster? (An insurance company with a freakishly profitable near-impossible-to-understand unit that does not report to any insurance regulators, for one!) Well anyway, Goldman ended up putting as much as twenty billion dollars "on the line" with AIG's CDS-es. Twenty billion dollars is just over a billion dollars less than Goldman gave out in Christmas bonuses last year because, in stark contrast to most other banks on Wall Street, Goldman had been so smart and prudent and visionary and bought CDS-es early and booked record profits. In any case, now Goldman was worried about AIG. Goldman stock could plummet if AIG went under! And Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein must have told his old boss Hank Paulson that, because Hank invited Lloyd to be the only investment banker in attendance at a special meeting two weeks ago about the fate of AIG. Hank saved the insurer, and while they were at it they made some sort of arrangement for Goldman and Morgan - the guys who hatched this whole plan in AIG's head to begin with! - to become "holding companies" that would be protected by the FDIC. This effectively eliminated investment banking, and one hopes, some of the heady profit margins with which it was once synonymous. 2. Because the system - like CNBC itself! - is rigged to reward fear of commitment. On CNBC this announcement was met with a lot of talk about how investment bank stocks would no longer "justify" their huge price-earnings ratios because, as real banks instead of specialized "investment" banks, they wouldn't be able to continue to take such big risks and generate the same grotesquely large profit margins they once did. There is something seriously warped about that mentality, though. If you watch CNBC you probably buy into the notion that profits are somehow "the bottom line," that the pursuit of profit makes everything more efficient, that profits create jobs and therefore salaries should more closely track the "bottom line," and if everything ran more "like a business" then employees would be more "accountable." Maybe you buy into this notion because it seems rational; maybe you buy into this notion because it takes so goddamn long at the DMV, but whatever the case, if you are watching CNBC now, it might dawn on you that they are too panicked trying to relay to you all this pressing urgent information to give you the real story, which is that all those assumptions about profits and the bottom line and accountability get turned completely on their heads when it you impose upon them the term limits of the fiscal year and everyone gets to cash out. Nowhere is our national fear of commitment more readily apparent than our willingness to allow Hank Paulson to pay no taxes on a half billion dollars in Goldman stock options to take a government job for three years because we are so wary of investing such faith in an entrenched bureaucrat, only to have him hit us up for a line of credit when all that fear of commitment results in a whopping expression of our collective fear of commitment. 3. "Demand" is also a construct. A corollary to the "profit" construct is the "demand" construct. A story: the other day my friend the NYSE trader was ruminating on the absurdity that the defining buzzword of the subprime mortgage crisis was "tranche." Yeah, why does everyone pronounce it funny? I wondered. Because it means 'slice' in French, he told me. When you are selling bonds assembled from the foggy promises of ignorant unskilled people to pay ever-increasing fees to ensure their continued residences in shitty overpriced tract homes in eastern San Diego for thirty fucking years - unskilled people who at best work themselves in real estate - it helps to pretty up the sales pitch with pretty French verbiage. On the front of today's Wall Street Journal "Marketplace" section are two stories on top of one another that form a neat little parable about the nature of demand. One is about how fast food chains like McDonald's and Panera Bread are worried about the credit crisis because Bank of America and other banks have suddenly tightened lending to people whose plan to make money depends on opening evermore McDonald's and Panera Bread locations. Just below this story is another story about how food makers like Campbell's, Kellogg and Kraft are excited about the credit crunch, because it enables them to make the pitch to American consumers to spend more money on "value" foodstuffs such as Frosted Flakes and condensed soup, and those kinds of foods have huge profit margins because of course they are actually a terrible value to consumers, but that doesn't matter as long as some ad agency is being paid eight figures to come up with a folksy campaign reminding Americans what great "value" they're getting. Whatever the outcome of the credit crunch, the only logical takeaway of the two stories goes, Americans will continue eating junk. Which reminds me: I could go for a tranche of pizza right now! But the point is, demand is highly manipulable, and we are the masters of manipulation. We've convinced ourselves that if a lower-profit margin-generating division of a company is sold to a Japanese company or simply discontinued it is because that division — and thus the country — is "moving up the value ladder." In the market's ceaseless quest to ascend the value ladder America has, of course, left behind such resilient, and also arguably valuable, industries as the manufacture of sophisticated computer chips and the construction of half-billion dollar oil tankers and probably soon car manufacture, for Asians to occupy themselves working on. 4. Good people will be punished. Good people are always punished. Just ask the Jews. The Asian countries, of course, are concerned about this. Just because they work six day weeks in sweltering assembly lines doesn't mean they aren't addicted to our demand. China keeps living standards artificially low to maintain high employment, and they build up excess reserves they have to invest it in our iffy financial system, and Chinese people are aware of this, which is why the government faces angry internet retaliation back home when those investments suffer, as they did when Blackstone stock started crashing a few months back. Which brings me to the Jews. As any Chinese person could tell you, the Jews have long been associated with a knack for making money. But many Jews also pursue relatively unprofitable jobs, like running for Congress. Much has been made of the need for Congress to vote on a bailout package before the Jewish holidays, because there are 43 Jews in Congress, almost all of them Democrats, and as Barney Frank so wryly noted last week "It's a well-known rule; God will only hear your prayers if you're in your congressional district." Barney can say that because he is of course himself Jewish. Anyway, this morning on CNBC Charlie Gasparino was trying desperately to hammer home to viewers that Barney Frank was largely to credit for getting the bailout package done in time to save Wall Street. (Uh, or not!?!) Other anchors kept cutting Charlie off. As Frank himself just told the Washington Post, "You don't get credit for a disaster averted." You also don't get credit for holding your nose and doing the politically unpopular thing and trying to avert disaster if you did not have the votes to avert disaster because everyone hates everyone. However, Barney Frank does get credit for being funny just now. Sigh. 5. And despite the protestations of contrarian pundits it is hard to believe some sort of disaster was/is not at hand. Because in a story on the Lehman bankruptcy today, the Wall Street Journal noted that the Tuesday morning following the announcement the London Interbank offered rate, the interest rate at which banks offer one another overnight loans, the interest rate to which some $300 trillion in contracts are anchored, rose from 3.11% the day before to 6.44% and "even at those rates, banks were balking at lending to one another." The two guys who actually calculate the Libor have not been on CNBC to my knowledge, but I bet I can tell you what they were thinking when they went through their spreadsheets that day: "Holy Fuck." (And maybe also: "Why again do we securitize mortgages? Isn't the one book read by everyone in the entire finance industry sort of about how that was a bad idea?) In any case, nothing on CNBC managed to be quite so startling as this story. Maybe because they've desensitized everyone with their incessant re-loop of Jim Cramer's prescient freakout clip.

♦ She's only been on the air a week but Rachel Maddow has already usurped Keith Olbermann in the ratings. [HuffPo]
♦ The New York Times Co. reported today that ad revenue in August dropped 14 percent compared to the same period a year ago and total revenue declined 8.8 percent for the month. [E&P]
♦ A libel lawsuit against author John Grisham has been dismissed. [AP]
♦ Is Al Gore buying a magazine? [Portfolio]
♦ The Atlantic's website has witnessed a surge of traffic thanks to those gross pics of John McCain drinking blood. [Portfolio]
♦ CNBC's Erin Burnett suggests that short-selling is unpatriotic; Jim Cramer says it may be terrorism. [CJR]

So it was a year ago now that shouting head Jim Cramer completely lost his mind in front of the cameras at CNBC. Cramer screamed that government officials had "NO IDEA how bad it is out there — NONE!!!" and that the economy was becoming "armageddon." It was glorious television. Now that the meltdown is truly molten, it's the former hedge-fund manager's turn to gloat. Last night on his Mad Money, Cramer assailed federal officials as "disgraceful" and "ignorant" for allowing things to get this bad. He also called Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke "in over his head." And he did it all with relative calm — perhaps content that, for once, he was both correct and correctly understood. (Twenty minutes later, Cramer was screaming "booyah!" and triggering cannon sound effects for his "Buy Or Sell... lightning round.") Video after the jump.