YouTube of the Day: Cramer in Meltdown

By Scott Horton

Jim Cramer is a sort of New York financial media fixture. He’s fast talking, extremely political, a bit full of himself, and often slightly hysterical. Generally he seems to know what he’s talking about, but I’ve seen some serious players in the market label his pearls of wisdom as senseless blather. And I don’t know many people would call him a “detached observer.” Still, Cramer has a solid audience and plenty of people find him informative and entertaining.

On August 2 he was on the air at his most hysterical, concerned about a meltdown in the fringe mortgage market. He aggressively advocated a Fed bailout for the financial institutions exposed in the collapsing market.

Here’s an iTulip.com YouTube that takes Cramer’s rant and patiently dissects it, giving a different view. I have no particular dog in the hunt here—for instance, on the issue of whether the Fed should “open the window” on the discount rate–but this does strike me as a very effective use of the YouTube medium. In the last two years, YouTube has made a difference in the Internet–decidedly for the better.