Stewart slams Cramer on Daily Show

American television had been waiting for this battle for weeks. Yesterday, Daily Show satirist Jon Stewart (pictured) interviewed Jim Cramer, the presenter of Mad Money, a light-hearted business show on CNBC, about his failure to ask Wall St the tough questions about the financial crisis.

It was a no-contest (see clip below) - as Cramer fell silent, squirmed and offered apologies, Stewart let rip with a 20-minute rant against the money-men. "You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months," he said. "It was disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

Cramer, a former financial trader and hedge fund manager himself, has marketed himself as Joe Public's economic insider, the man who'd tell it like it was. He went on The Daily Show after Stewart had previously showed a clip of Cramer enthusiastically urging viewers to buy stock in investment bank Bear Stearns, shortly before it collapsed and share prices tumbled to a fifth of their value.

Cramer had responded: "The absurdity astounds me. [Jon Stewart] is a comedian, and he's decided to focus on some calls I made during a bull market. The guy is a comedian."

But when he appeared on The Daily Show, all Cramer could offer was contrition. And when he said that there was a market for his style of frothy business television, Stewart retorted: "There's a market for cocaine and hookers."

"We're both snake-oil salesmen to a certain extent," Stewart said. "But we do label it 'snake oil' here." He expressed some sympathy for making Cramer a scapegoat for his network's wider failings, citing "the gap between what CNBC advertises itself as and what it is."

With the end of the Bush administration, many speculated that liberal comics were going to find it tough to find new targets. Stewart seems to have found his niche on Wall Street.