It's tough to make business news fun and interesting; just ask any business reporter.
But Jon Stewart, a rank amateur, makes it look easy. Time and again he touched on the biggest business stories of the day, boiling down complicated subjects with humor, sarcasm and plenty of populist outrage. Here are a few of our favorites.
Stewart's rants about the financial crisis were instant classics. This one, on the foreclosure crisis, nailed the hypocrisy at the root of the trouble.
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Stewart pulled no punches when interviewing the man who masterminded the U.S. government's response to the financial crisis, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. “This is like an optical illusion,” Stewart said to Geithner. “One person looks at it and you see a pretty girl. And then you flip it and the other person looks at it and sees... America getting fucked.”
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Stewart used his program to defend numerous different groups, but teachers might have gotten his best efforts. With a healthy dose of sarcasm, he took teachers to task for being greedy, overpaid moochers.
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Stewart's correspondents also took on business subjects, with Samantha Bee filing a particularly cutting piece about the private equity company Blackstone.
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Stewart wasn't above delving into a little financial ridiculousness as well. When the U.S. government was in danger of running out of money, the idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin was floated. Stewart had a bit of fun with it:
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Last but not least, Stewart touched on AIG, the insurance giant that was bailed out by the U.S. government in the wake of the financial crisis. AIG and its leadership filed a lawsuit in 2014 alleging that the terms of the bailouts were unfair.
Stewart had fun with that one.