Cramer vs. Kramer
Which is Jimbo, and which is Cosmo?
One of these had a famous TV role as a likeable, yet bombastic and eccentric guy. He also had a brief dalliance with Communism. While he always seemed to have money and means for himself, anyone getting involved in one of his money-making schemes usually ended up losing… big time! People only learn about his past in tidbits that slowly come out over time. He often poses as a wise, wealthy, and successful professional to trick people in the schemes he cooks up.
And the other lived in apartment 5B on Seinfeld.
Jim Cramer packs all the ridiculous punch of a supporting character in a sitcom, yet there are some who are genuinely still interested in what the man has to say. Apparently, neither Cramer nor astrology are going away anytime soon, even as both share a penchant for ignoring the abounding examples of patently wrong predictions as well as capitalizing on a few correct ones that depend on ambiguity, perception, and plausible deniability for their accuracy. I suppose he is successful in many ways—He has a TV show; I don’t. But at some point success has to share the same measure as science. It has to be repeatable. Tell the world you created a cold fusion reaction in your basement and you’ll get a little TV time, too. When it turns out that no one can duplicate the results using your methods, you’ll be tossed into the trash-heap of has-beens and wanna-bes. Given that your statistical best method of success is to do the opposite of what Cramer recommends, you have to wonder how far he is from such a fate.
Now Cramer tells us, for our own good and because of his benevolence, of course, that anyone needing access to their money in the next 5 years should get out of the stock market now. Genius! Never mind that short-term investors are largely responsible for market volatility, anyway. The truth is that investments carrying higher short-term risk yet higher long-term yield should be traded towards the opposite end of that spectrum as the day requiring the output nears. In some way, his prediction will come true. If you found that piece of information useful, let me also tell you that it will rain somewhere today, more than one but definitely less than 6 billion people will die today, and someday you’ll meet a stranger who will become your friend. Once predictions become as hokey and trite as Cramer’s, you’re almost obliged to add “in bed” to the end of them as you eat the tasteless cookie from which they sprang.
Jim Cramer has openly admitted using the media to manipulate stock prices. Hmmm… a system in which he wins when others lose? You have to wonder how he comes out ahead each time he gives moronic advice. Maybe that is the plan from the get-go. If you tell millions of people to get out of a market because the prices will fall, then many of those millions will get out, causing the prices to fall. Chicken or egg? Obviously the politicians pushing the bailout who said it had to be exactly x and passed by date y or the market would tumble got Jimbo’s memo. And when the self-fulfilling prophesies come true, the rest of the minions who didn’t get on board early soon follow. Thus, manipulation supplants leadership.
When you let what you hear supersede that which you know, you are in danger. Advice is a wonderful thing, and I can’t think of many instances wherein what we know to be true wasn’t influenced by someone who taught or advised us. We take that in, and it becomes part of our accumulated knowledge. Living on your own terms doesn’t mean ignoring good sense and wise advice. However, whenever I hear someone speak in absolutes, I become a skeptic. When someone limits me to two choices, I become a skeptic. When someone says any one thing happening or not happening will have disastrous consequences, I become a skeptic. Especially in troubled times, we need to be more skeptical and rely more on what we know than what others supposedly know. We need to challenge assumptions, knowing it was many bad assumptions by people who supposedly knew better than we who led us to where we are. And if you insist on watching someone with weird beliefs, crazy schemes, and successful endings to chaotic misadventures, you can always watch a Seinfeld rerun.
Jared A. Chambers
