Ray Dalio Now Expected To Endure On-Air Abuse From Famous Nobody Joe Kernen

If I told you that Ray Dalio showed up on Squawk Box on Monday and ended up in a pseudo-shouting match with Joe Kernen, the first question you would probably ask yourself is “Who is Joe Kernen to argue with Ray Dalio about anything?”

The answer is obviously “nobody” – and on multiple levels.

For one thing, Joe is “nobody” in a kind of general sense, where that means that outside of anyone who enjoys watching financial news, nobody knows who he is. If you didn’t watch CNBC and you Googled Joe, the first thing you would read about him in his Wikipedia bio is that “He is currently co-host of CNBC’s Squawk Box [and] his nickname is ‘The Kahuna'”. Contrary to what the folks over at the network might have told him, Joe is not famous. Not even a little bit. In fact, Joe’s hair is more famous than he is. 

Easily the most impressive thing about Kernen is his master’s from MIT. Apparently, his research “focused on mouse erythroleukemia cells and resulted in a series of publications in well-known scientific journals.” That’s great – good for Joe.

But it was all downhill from there, apparently, because his career in finance is a case study in mediocrity as are his on-air pretensions to economic and political profundity.

Really, Joe should count himself blessed that he gets to spend his entire career hanging out with the titans of finance, and maybe he does, but on some days the humility he should harbor doesn’t come through. One of those days was Monday, when he decided he would try to engage Ray Dalio – who, no matter what you think about him, is basically a god – in a debate about the extent to which capitalism has become the bane of the American dream.

Dalio, you’ll recall, penned two lengthy critiques of capitalism last week. You can read them here and here.

He also showed up on 60 Minutes last night to expound on the issue further. You can watch the video for yourself, but if you read his posts from last week (or really, if you know anything at all about the evolution of inequality in America) you already know the story. Here’s a quote from the 60 Minutes interview:

I think that if I was the president of the United States… what I would do is recognize that this is a national emergency. If you look at history like the late 1930s, if you have a group of people who have very different economic conditions and you have an economic downturn, you have conflict. I think the American dream is lost. All the wealth being created isn’t translating to opportunity for others. It’s not redistributing opportunity. We can call it a wealth gap, you can call it an income gap… It’s unfair… it’s unproductive, and at the same time… [it] threatens to split us.

So that’s the setup for what turned into an absolute and total farce on CNBC Monday morning when Kernen eventually managed to get Ray so riled up that Dalio said this:

One way or another you’ve got to engineer the goddamn thing to get results.

As you’ll see, Kernen was being deliberately obtuse and before it was all over, lapsed into abject nonsense in an effort to disingenuously separate policy from capitalism. Here’s the “best” (or “worst”, depending on how you want to look at it) moment:

Below is the full video and it’s made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Joe is sporting what looks like a presidential Rolex while shouting down an incredulous Dalio, who at one point lamented that “I honestly don’t understand what it is we’re arguing about”.