March 6, 2009

The Daily Show on the Financial Crisis

"If I had only followed CNBC's advice, I'd have a million dollars today, provided I'd started with $100 million."
-- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

All of Wednesday's show was devoted to the current financial crisis. The first segment is the best (and several of the political blogs I read have put up this video as well). Idiot Rick Santelli of CNBC recently ranted about the possibility of "loser homeowners" getting financial relief on their "underwater" mortgages while conveniently forgetting that the financial industry has received over $2 trillion in bailout money. Stewart rips CNBC a huge one when Santelli "bailed out" of appearing on the show.

The second segment is on the stupid right wing meme that President Obama is somehow responsible for the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been plummeting over the past few months, once again conveniently forgetting how much the stock market had plunged in the last year (especially in the months of September and October) of the Bush misadministration. I did have a good laugh at the idea of a stock ticker running over Obama's eyes. ;)

The last segment is an interview Stewart has with Joe Nocera, financial columnist for The New York Times. Overall, I must say that I'm surprised that The Daily Show took as long as they did to cover the nonsense spewed at CNBC; a number of blogs on economics and politics that I read have been criticizing CNBC for a couple months now.







Update: As Think Progress reports, CNBC and Rick Santelli are clamming up, trying to wait out the storm created by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show by declining comment. In the meantime, Stewart appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman and discussed the situation a little more:

5 comments:

Naeem: said...

AA- JD,

I especially liked Stewart's response to 'ponzi' Stanford answering what it feels like to be a billionaire. Very articulate. ;-)

Anonymous said...

I love the first video. Mr. Santelli is such an idiot. CNBS sure needs to employ new analysts. But who hasn't been wrong about this crisis after all. Very funny video though, thank you for posting!

Take care, Lorne

Anonymous said...

off the top of my head nouriel roubini is one that hasn't been wrong about it and was talking about it since '02 atleast... and there are others but their name doesn't come as readily :D

JDsg said...

Bambam: I agree that there are the occasional guests on CNBC who give some straight talk about the state of the economy. Roubini is probably one; I'm not too familiar with him, however. Peter Schiff is another; I wrote about him last November. I don't watch CNBC too often (mostly for The Tonight Show on the weekends ;) ), but the few times I listen to the talking heads (while looking at the exchange rates and commodities prices, which is the real reason why I'm on that channel), I'm not too impressed. In November, I said that I wasn't sure if they were really propagandizing on programs like CNBC, but now I'm leaning more in that direction, that they are.

Anonymous said...

Oh i was hardly defending cnbc ... i don't watch TV ! :P
I was just mentioning someone who was able to predict (makes it sound like fortune telling when it totally isn't) the crisis ahead of time