Cramer vs. Cramer: critics say Wall Street's favorite talking head is obnoxious, abusive, and crooked. Jim Cramer takes issue with "crooked.". - 'Confessions of a Street Addict' and 'Trading with the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street' - book review

Washington Monthly, June, 2002 by Jamie Malanowski

The book is incredibly naive--somewhere there may be a man who is a hero to his valet, but there is no boss whose tender, callow, insecure junior staff feels that he or she really recognizes their great pools of talent and ability--but that doesn't mean it isn't credible. I believe Cramer behaved like a jerk; he admits he was, though obliquely and screened with self-justifications ("To make the hired folk feel the pain when they botch the job and go long on a bum stock ... to me there is no stronger way to drive the point home than writing out the symbol of the piece-of-garbage stock on a Post-It and making the poor slob who picked it stick the Post-It on his forehead and wear it all day until I felt the shame had registered.") But it is the nature of bosses to behave this way--well, not this exact way--at least sometimes. Maier made a lot of money working for Cramer. Few of us are as well subsidized when we learn our life lessons. He should shut up.

It's Cramer who should talk more. He's clearly embarrassed by a lot of his excessive behavior. He rationalizes some of it and excuses some of it and simply regrets some more, but never does he really explain why he drove himself to behave the way he did. He often looks like a nearly out-of-control person whose only limit was what he thought he could get away with. In one especially dark story, the editor-in-chief of TheStreet.com (who Cramer later discovers is "an alcoholic [who] had to be fired immediately") suggests to Cramer that they cut Peretz--Cramer's partner and patron--out of the decision-making process. Cramer, apparently without hesitation, agreed; eventually, he reaped the whirlwind. Cramer makes no effort now to justify his bad behavior, but he also doesn't explain why he committed such a rash, risky, treacherous act. Though he calls himself an addict in the book's title, the term is treated mostly as a metaphor. Yet the book is filled with examples of self-destructive behavior, which Cramer treats more as crosses to bear or inexplicable mistakes than as a pattern of pathologies justified because the perpetrator kept malting money and TV appearances.

It's in light of these transgressions that we must view Maier's more sensational charges. He originally alleged that Cramer used inside information to profit by trading in shares of a company called Western Digital, and that he was investigated by securities regulators. Maier also wrote that Cramer manipulated CNBC reporters by giving them information about a company whose stock he wanted to trade. When Cramer threatened to sue for libel, Maier's publisher, HarperCollins, pulled the book from the stores and printed a new edition that deleted only the material about Western Digital, saying that it stood by the rest of the material. In an interview, Maier says his big mistake was simply confusing the names of two companies. Well, whatever. The odd thing is that the accusation gains no special credibility from what Maier says about Cramer, but from what Cramer says about himself. "Who would come in and handle the pressure when I [said] `Let's see how fast we can make him cry?' ... Who could take my incessant badgering about how I would never forgive them or their children for losing my partners' money? ... Only someone who knew I paid $10,000 bonuses on the spot for good ideas ... Only someone who knew I paid my assistant a half million bucks to take the abuse I dealt out ... Someone who wanted to be right and be paid more than he would be anywhere else on earth to be right."