Mad Money Man Jim Cramer

Dan Rather Profiles Jim Cramer, Who Wants To Make You Rich

(CBS) 

Cramer made his reputation and fortune as a smart and shrewd stock market trader. But what distinguishes him now on television is his nuttiness. He’s the Jerry Lewis of business show hosts and he will do anything to grab your attention.

“One day you’re gonna wake up and the whole country will be taken over by India,” Cramer tells his audience.

Cramer says his viewers see the real Jim Cramer on television.

Herb Greenberg, a senior columnist for MarketWatch.com, is a frequent on-air guest. He and Cramer enjoy duking it out.

Does Greenberg think Cramer is crazy? “I think Jim has great passion. Is he crazy? I think he's got the craziness that comes with intelligence and brilliance and creativity,” explains Greenberg.

Asked how he differs from Cramer, Greenberg says, “We're looking at the world through two very different sets of eyes. I'm looking at what can go wrong, Jim's looking at what can go right. Jim's looking at how you can make money, I'm looking at how you can avoid losing money. But that's what makes markets.”

There was a time in America when the market was the playground of only the very rich. That changed in the 1970s, a decade that marked the beginning of an investing craze. Today, about half of all Americans are in the stock market.

Jim Cramer was among those who helped make stocks popular. And despite the recent scandals at Enron and other companies where executives were accused of corrupting the market, he remains as bullish as ever.

Cramer acknowledges that he has said there are periods during which the market is rigged for insiders, yet he advises his viewers to buy various stocks. How does he reconcile that?

“I think that we are in a period of catharsis now where people who cook books go to jail for 25 years. And that has changed the equation and made business more honest then it was. I think the answer is, is that overall, high quality stocks have out-performed all other asset classes, whether it be gold, whether it be real estate, whether it be bonds,” explains Cramer. “So therefore, you've got to try to find the high quality ones. Because the averages are in your favor.”

Cramer started studying stocks in the fourth grade, continued the habit through high school, got more compulsive about it at Harvard, and never really stopped.

“I'd go to a ballgame. And it'd be like, ‘Oh, look at that, you know, there's a Budweiser sign. Bud, you know 42 and three-quarters, having a hard time going past 43. And you know, people aren’t drinking beer over there. Take a look it'll be a hotdog company. I'll be, like, Ballpark Franks, Sara Lee…’ And, you know, these are things in my head.”

Cramer says he has several thousand stocks in his head, and has for a long time.

Cramer started out as a newspaper reporter making $15,000 a year, but before you could say “Warren Buffet” he was running a hedge fund where he made his fortune.

He got a group of wealthy investors to cough up at least $5 million each and sunk the money, about $450 million, in the market. Cramer took lots of risks, suffered reverses, and kept over 20 percent of the profits. A middle-class kid from the suburbs of Philadelphia, he became one of the most successful traders on Wall Street.