访谈录 2009-05-04&05-06 金融危机中新闻媒体的角色

I mean, I gotta tell you. You know, I understand you want to make finance entertaining. But it's not a f… game. And I, when I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is, you all know, you all know what's going on. You know, you can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative 1 market stuff that is this weird 2 Wall Street’s side bet.

Jon, don't you want guys like me who've been in it to show the shenanigans. What else can I do? I mean last night show...

No…, I want desperately 3 for that. But I feel like that's not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is, listen, you knew what banks were doing and yet were touting 4 it for months and months. The entire network was. And so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy once in a life time tsunami 5 that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous 6 at best and criminal at worst.

But Dick Fuld who ran Lehman Brothers called me in. (Right.) He called me in when the stock was at 40 'cause I was saying that, look, I thought the stock was wrong, I thought it was the wrong place to be, brings me in, lies to me, lies to me, lies to me, I’ve known him for 20 years.

The CEO of a company lied to you?

Shocker. Stop trading.

But isn’t that financial reporting? Well, I mean, I guess, what you feel is the role of CNBC?

Look, I have called for star chambers 7. I want kangaroo courts for these guys. I really do. I want indictments 8. We've not seen any indictments. Where are, where’s the indictments for AIG? I’ve been, I told the Justice Department, here’s the way you get the indictments.

It's very easy to get on this after the fact. The measure of the network and measure of mass (media), CNBC could act as, you know, in some ways. Look, nobody’s asking for them to be a regulatory agency. But can, what, whose side are they on. It feels like they have to reconcile, is their audience, the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit on a day to day, the short term. These guys, these companies were on a Sherman's March through their companies, financed by our 401K’s and all the incentives 9 of their companies were for short term profit. And they burned the f…house down with our money and walked away rich as hell. And you guys knew that that was going on.

Okay. All right, I have a wall of shame. Why don’t I have banana cream pies 'cause I throw them at CEOs. Do you know how many times I have pantsed CEOs on my show?

But this isn’t as Carly Simon would say, this song ain't about you.

OK, all right. You’re right. I don't wanna personalize it. But I think that we have reporters who try really hard. We are not always told the truth. But most importantly the market was going up for a long time. And our real sin I think was to believe that it can continue to go up a lot in the face of what you describe, which is a lot of borrowing, a lot of shenanigans and I know I did. I’ll bring it up. I didn't think that Bear Stearns was gonna evaporate overnight. I didn't. I knew the people who ran it. I had always thought they were honest. That was my mistake. I really did, I thought they were honest. Did I get taken in 'cause I knew them from before? Maybe to the some degree. The guy who came on from Wachovia was an old friend of mine who’d helped hire me. I trusted him.

Honest or not, honest or not in what world is a 35 to 1 leverage 10 position sane 11?

The world that made you 30% year after year, after year beginning from 1999 to 2007 and it became very difficult to decline.

But isn't that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don't have to do anything. Any time you sell people the idea that, sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money. Don't you always know that that's gonna be a lie. When are we gonna realize in this country that our wealth is work, that we’re workers, and by selling this idea of "hey, man, I'll teach you how to be rich." How was that different than infomercial?

Well, I don't think... I think that your goals should always be to try to expose the fact that there is no easy money. I wish I’d found Madoff. I wish everyone else had found Madoff.

But there are literally 12 shows called “Fast Money”.

Well, I think that people, there is a market for (it) and you give it to them. And I think we do...

There is a market for cocaine 13 and hookers.