Mad Money - Reception

Reception

According to Nielsen Ratings, on July 7, 2008, the show had 228,000 viewers for its 6 pm airing and 133,000 viewers for its 11 pm rebroadcast. On March 9, 2009, the show had 328,000 viewers for 6 pm and 176,000 viewers for 11 pm.

In January 2006, Joseph Nocera, a business columnist at The New York Times, opined that the "people who are watching Mad Money and following Cramer's advice are fools." In late January 2007, Henry Blodget – himself indicted for civil securities fraud in 2002 and banned for life from the securities industry – criticized Cramer for overstating his abilities as a market forecaster, noting that in 2006 Cramer's suggested portfolio lost money "despite nearly every major equity market on earth being up between about 15% and 30%." In August 2007, Cramer called for the Federal Reserve to support hedge funds that were losing money in the subprime mortgage crisis, prompting Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, to accuse Cramer of advocating an offensive and catastrophic "socialism for capitalists". In March 2009, Cramer and CNBC were criticized by Jon Stewart of the Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Stewart questioned CNBC's reporting practices and what should have been done to possibly aid in preventing the economic crisis occurring at the time. See the Jon Stewart's 2009 criticism of CNBC for further details. Some regular listeners to the program have noted that Cramer has a history of denying or attempting to mitigate bad advice he has given on the show. For example, during the banking melt-down of 2009, Cramer suggesting buying some of these stocks because they were prime take-over targets. Later, after the stocks crashed to record lows and in some cases went bankrupt and/or lost all shareholder value, Cramer denied to a caller(s) that he ever recommended buying these stocks as they crashed.