Quote from ang_99:
John Stewart was insinuating that wall street is some giant fraud and traders somehow control the market at the expense of investors. Stewart was saying everybody involved with wall street should have seen the financial mess. Completely retarted. ...
Having spent the past 12+ yrs of my life on wall street (modeling, analysis and trading). I think you missed the point of Jon Stewart's argument.
Let me get a transcript now. Stewart said, "The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission." That's the whole point of his thesis.
Compare the questioning of Wall street practices by the financial news mdia, and say Clinton's decision to raise taxes. There were far more objective reporting on the political front. Often the political news will have some opposition leader on (say Newt or Bob Dole), saying that raise taxes is a horrible idea, etc, etc.
With the usage of leverage increase in Wall street firms rising, why didn't CNBC put up a graph showing the increase? Why didn't Bloomberg have economists on saying that "an over leveraged credit industry is akin to a time bomb"? That's the point. Seriously economists tend to be "negative" and also "boring".
Also, Stewart did not put down all of wall street. Towards end he mentioned "a lot the ppl on wall street are smart and hard working, and they got f*cked by this as well." It is absolutely true.
The point of CNBC's duplicity in the whole fiasco reminded me of one conversation I had, about 2 years after I joined an investment bank. I asked an equity strategist, some what casually, why he didn't rate the stocks "sell" if he knows those stocks will go down. And he just looked at me, "You don't want to do that, if you rate a stock a sell, it's trading volume will go down." The underlying theme is "our pay are all driven by higher trading volume, why the hell would I want to lower that?" And he is absolutely right.
It is the *exactly* the same thing with the Financial News industry. They want to report the "rosy" stock markets, that CEO are pseudo-Gods, and "Star Traders" are stuff of legends. Then more viewers would tune in, and higher advertising rates, and higher income for the "on-air personalities". It is shilling for the financial industry, not "news" or any serious "analysis". It is like Casinos running classes on Craps, and parading "million-dollar Craps Legends" before the new players. This is no different. But at least at Casinos, you know the guy is shilling, not under guise of some "independent serious news or analysis".