Is Cramer’s latest caper ploy or confession?

So what exactly was author and CNBC television personality Jim Cramer up to when he gave that now-notorious…

So what exactly was author and CNBC television personality Jim Cramer up to when he gave that now-notorious web interview to a colleague at TheStreet.com last December? Expunging a guilty conscience? Trying to get still more publicity? Giving the public valuable insights into the inner workings of Wall Street?
In the Wall Street Confidential webcast, which was first reported by the New York Post last week, Mr. Cramer brags about how he gamed the stock market while he was a hedge fund manager in the 1980s and ’90s.
He describes how hedge fund managers “foment” a stock by creating a false impression about a company in order to drive the stock price up or down.
Although the practice is “blatantly illegal,” Mr. Cramer says, “the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t understand it.”
Fomenting is widespread, he asserts, but never admits to doing it himself.
Mr. Cramer does say, however: “A lot of times, when I was short, I would create a level of activity beforehand that would drive the futures … It’s a fun game.”
What’s key for those in “hedge fund mode,” he says, “is not to do anything remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view that it’s important to create a new truth, to develop a fiction.”
Mr. Cramer did not clarify if he is remotely truthful on his popular “Mad Money” television show.

Boomers beware
Living longer may be good for baby boomers, but not for everyone else, critics charge. Sonia Arrison, a senior fellow at the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute, described in the Los Angeles Times last week the “alarming social and political consequences of longer, healthier lives.” She wrote: “Poor financial decisions — such as Americans’ abysmal savings rates — will be amplified by longer lives.” Adding to the “growing strain on the Social Security trust fund” is the “outdated idea that one can retire at age 65,” Ms. Arrison wrote.
Author Christopher Buckley, meanwhile, is zooming up the best-seller lists with his new satire, “Boomsday,” published by Twelve of New York. It describes a world in the not-so-distant future where young Americans have come up with incentives for boomers to “transition”(read: commit suicide) at age 65 so their kids won’t be stuck with that budget-busting Social Security tab. Incidentally, PBS on Wednesday will air a documentary, “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046.”

Research repercussions
If you’re not a Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. client but have been using the giant New York-based company’s research, you’re going to have to wait longer.
The firm will begin new restrictions and delays on media access to select Merrill research, as well as limiting access to research on Merrill’s proprietary site and external-vendor platform, said Candace Browning, head of global securities research and economics at the company. In a memo, she said the firm’s research is too broadly available and, “much like the music and film industries before us, is in the process of being Napsterized.” Ms. Browning was especially upset at “a New Jersey-based digital financial news source” fitting the description of theflyonthewall.com. The site, she said, copied a recent market-moving Merrill research report “within 60 seconds.”

Starr vs. SOX
Kenneth Starr may not have Bill Clinton to kick around anymore, but there’s always big business’ favorite piñata, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The law, according to Mr. Starr, co-counsel for the Washington-based Free Enterprise Fund, is “onerous and burdensome. It is also deeply unconstitutional.”
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia disagreed with him last week, however, and threw out a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a Washington-based government agency created by SOX to regulate the accounting industry.