Rocky and I watch a tape of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show , Stewart  almost beside himself with fury, unable to sit still in the chair, pushing and then pleading, shaking, bullying  and then begging–admit it, admit it!–as if the great financial meltdown was Jim Cramer’s fault and that Cramer, single-handedly, had destroyed the savings of millions of Americans and had wrecked the economies of the world.

Rocky, already fragile because of the wind and the thunder and the sheeting rain–we had walked despite the storms, wind-blown, wet, half blinded, alone, the two of us on the boardwalk, the sand whipping around my legs and covering Rocky in a film of brown specks– has been stretched out beside my feet , quietly whimpering as the wind rushes in through his dog door, when Stewart begins to interview Kramer.

Amost immediately, Rocky, as if he realises this will be no regular Stewart interview–sharp, polite, deferential at times, seemingly light- hearted but not trivial, not playing it just for laughs –sits up, his head quizzical, at a 45 degree angle to his body. He seems surprised then shocked.  As Stewart skewers Cramer, as Cramer looks more and more pathetic, beaten, even self-loathing–Rocky  moves to his dog door and lies down beside it, trembling, his head turned away from me as if in disappointment. 

Jim Cramer was once, in the words of  the writer Tom Wolfe, a master of the universe. A bond trader, a hedge fund manager, a stock market maiven,  Cramer became the voice of the crazy  good times, that five year period from 2002 to 2007  that, looking back, was probably the 21st century equivalent of the 20th century’s Roaring Twenties. I have no idea who were the Jim Cramers of that time, but no doubt they existed–on radio but more probably, in newspapers.

When I lived in Washington, Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, a nightly half hour show on the business network CNBC,  was a hoot. Cramer never spoke in anything less than a shout. He bellowed most of the time. He had some sort of bells and whistles contraption which he used to signal his approval or disapproval of a particular stock. Cartoon bulls roared out at you. Cartoon bears snarled at stocks Cramer despised. Sleeves rolled up above his elbows, his mostly bald head covered in sweat, his voice always at breaking point, Cramer strangled effigies of CEOs he didn’t like and sawed off the arms –metaphorically– of some or other hapless regulator or politician he thought less than competent.

I liked Cramer, not that I had any idea what exactly he was on about. There was something so  energetic about him, manic, driven and at the same time, close to self-mocking, that I found endearing. The people who phoned in for his tips loved him:  he seemed to pick winners–every stock Cramer recommended soared the next morning and every stock he gave the bear roar to, fell. Or so it seemed to me. It is only in retrospect that I realise that Cramer was a spruiker for the crazy times. That was his role. If he ever had an inkling that the madness could not last, that Wall Street had become diseased, that incompetents–at best -were running America’s financial institutions, he never ever said a word about it.

I liked Jon Stewart too. The Daily Show  skewered the banalities and pomposities of cable news with style. Okay, the targets–Bill O’Reilly on Fox for instance or the bland and humorless Wolf Blitzer on CNN were easy to mock but there was a serious intent to the satire. The Daily Show was the chief source of news for many young people because it was actually full of insightful analysis of the news of the day.  But in those heady days long gone, when Stewart’s market linked 401k– the equivalent, to a certain extent, of a super account in Australia– was going through the stratosphere, I can’t recall him giving Cramer much of a hard time.

Now here is  Stewart giving Cramer hell– why you have to wonder  has Cramer agreed to subject himself to this excoriation which is deadly serious in its fury without even the hint of a joke to ease the tension–and like David Frost in his interviews of Richard Nixon, at least as they are portrayed in the film Frost/Nixon, prodding Cramer, pushing him, abusing him, cajoling him to admit that he Cramer personally –and the CNBC network in general–is responsible for the fact that Stewart’s 401k is close to kaput.

I switch off the television at the end of this interview and notice that the storm has abated. The sun is half-out from behind the thinning grey clouds. Rocky comes back to sit beside me. He looks hopeful, quietly eager: he thinks there’s a chance we might go out now that the storm has passed and that angry man’s voice has gone away.

The footpaths outside are puddle-covered and the gutters overflowing, blocked here and there by mounds of leaves and the left-over garbage of last night’s St Kilda tourists. Why they might think it cool to eat McDonald’s across from the small park at the far end of Peanut reserve and drop the packaging into the gutters  is beyond me. When Rocky comes across this McDonald’s refuse, he becomes desperate, straining at the leash, pleading with me to allow him to stick his face into an empty hamburger box; dogs, like humans have a hankering for junk food.

I think of Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer and what it meant, Stewart’s anger and Cramer’s beaten-down responses. I wonder about Australia’s Cramer equivalents– do they exist?– and will they too get the Stewart treatment from…whom? I wonder whether the financial journalists and the economic commentators and the financial wizards and advisers who can still be heard on radio and seen on television, handing out advice to us hapless punters who no-longer know who to believe, I wonder whether there is anything for which they should be held to account–perhaps their failure to warn that the good times might be built on illusions and falsehoods and that our economic future was in the hands of the unhinged.

I have been around a long time. I recall the period preceding the crash of 1987, when Christopher Skase and Alan Bond and other assorted crooks and spivs who collectively ruined the lives of tens of thousands of Australians, were pin-up boys of many Australian financial and business journalists. I wonder whether this is a chronic condition. An American financial commentator–the Stewart interview with Cramer was widely commented on in the US media-and indeed made page one of the Financial Times- when asked how she explained the fact that in the main, economic and financial journalists failed to warn that the five year boom could well end in a huge bust, said journalists were in the business of reporting what was happening not what might happen.

There is Stewart like anger now in some of the reporting of the GFC and the GR in Australia, but for mine, much of it is almost hysterical. When I saw a humorless white- faced Stewart bashing away at Cramer, it did seem that Stewart was motivated not so much by the fact that the American economy had fallen off a cliff, but that his 401k was stuffed. When I watched some Australian journalists go after some of our politicians over the GFC and where it might end–with a depression, go on say it!–the  thought did cross my mind that perhaps what truly alarmed some of these interviewers was what had happened to their superannuation accounts.

And as we walk, Rocky oblivious  to my faraway-ness, I suspect that my sense of foreboding about where this Great Recession might be going and about the changes it may bring,  is hopelessly coloured by the fact that I am no longer young and the time for all things is now.