By Dylan Matthews
Harvard Crimson lore has it that somewhere in the newspaper's building, you can find the old portrait of Lenin that Jim Cramer used to hang in his office. Cramer, back in the '70s, was an actual Communist; not "restoring the top marginal rate to 39.6%" Communist, mind you, but "establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat through bloody class struggle" Communist. So it's heartening that he's followed the David Horowitz path and figured out how to be wrong about everything in a totally different way. I'll let Jon Stewart explain:
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It's easy to attack Stewart, as Cramer and Scarborough did, and accuse him of cherry-picking Cramer's predictions for effect. But it wouldn't really matter. A broader look doesn't do his track record any favors (via TAP's own Alexandra Gutierrez):
Actually, I'll give Cramer some props. With the small exceptions of Boeing, GM, and IBM, the market tends to do the reverse of what he anticipates. Remember that Seinfeld episode where George decides to do the opposite of what his instinct tells him, and his life instantly improves? Cramer's investment advice is kind of like that. You can make some money with it, provided you short the stocks he likes and buy the ones he tells viewers to sell.
