When Jon Stewart Took on Wall Street

Joe Nocera in the NY Times has a nice memory of how Stewart took apart the Wall Street media.

“Stewart had no special Wall Street knowledge, as he was the first to admit. What he had was a nose for a scam, and an uncanny ability to articulate what the rest of us were feeling.

“He mocked the way Wall Street firms paid ungodly sums to settle government charges without ever admitting guilt (a subject later championed, less humorously, by Federal Judge Jed Rakoff). He lampooned the way dubious deals — particularly the notorious Goldman Sachs Abacus deal — were legal, even as they oozed with sleaze. After J.P. Morgan’s big London Whale losses, he showed a Senate hearing where senators cravenly solicited regulatory advicefrom the company’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon — and then noted that J.P. Morgan was often their biggest campaign contributor. And so on.