How Bad Will the Next Recession Be?
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted October 26, 2007.

If our government really is a corporation and Bush is its CEO, we're
all likely to be self-employed contractors out of a job.

"My rant was the rant heard around the world," CNBC personality and
ex-hedge funder James Cramer told viewers of his cable show Mad Money,
a talk-radio spectacle involving its host's over-the-top antics like
hitting sound-effects buttons and giving stock advice at breakneck
speed. The setting was 2007's fiscal third quarter, a highly volatile
period in which the market nosedived on the heels of a subprime
housing and credit meltdown.

In the rant, broadcast on the show Stop Trading! before becoming an
online hit, Cramer aggressively screamed for a rate cut from the Fed
for his "people [who] have been in this business for 25 years!" -- by
which he meant, of course, the hedge funders whose deceptive bundling
of mortgage-backed securities built on subprime loans and no oversight
from the SEC whatsoever are finally getting their comeuppance.

Cramer, who ignored repeated requests for participation in this story
and its predecessor, viewable on AlterNet here, made it pretty clear
that his friends in the hedge fund industry manipulate the credit...