Oh, the delicious irony: As CNBC enjoys record ratings, Emmy nominations, and "impressive" profit margins, the business network is succumbing to the same financial crisis that allows it to played in every gym, stock floor, and economy-savvy home in America. Shakespeare couldn't have written it better himself, only to have it adapted by Ethan Hawke and turned into a terrible film.

Meanwhile, the 40+ anchors over at NBC's spin-off enjoy a moment their moment in the spotlight, as their constant visage rockets them into a quasi-celebrity status that's riffed on in the station's newest ad campaign, which promotes the individual reporter over the collective network.

Which in itself may prove to be a greater failing of the network: at a time when broadcast journalism is recognizing that their anchors might be the most expendable asset of the company, should a cable station let all of their notoriety rest of Maria Bartiromo 's tiny shoulders and Jim Cramer's maniac mug?

It would be great if there was something Americans could learn from this recession: maybe a moral about how unlimited greed of a few ends in poverty for everyone, or maybe just a couple sadder but wiser families that now put frugality and food above living in a house they can't afford.

Or maybe, what everyone needs to be taking away from this economic crisis is that it's an even better time to start throwing your money in the toilet and purchasing lottery tickets! Or taking off of work for a couple weeks to compete in a reality television show that offers a big buyout! Unrealistic expectations of huge, undeserved financial reward is not a new concept, but seems particularly telling now, where companies are trading in their traditional prizes of new cars (which are basically worthless now, right?) in lieu of cold, hard cash to entice consumers to their products.

Of course, it's not supposed to be all about the money that encourages people to participate. It's a learning experience!

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CNBC might be kicking the life out of News Corp.'s own business network in the ratings, and the channel might be hemorrhaging money faster than Palin with PMS, but the FBN's website actually saw a relatively huge increase of unique visitors in the last month, and had the 21st largest unique users according to Nielsen's, which does Internet counting now, I guess.

It's funny that Rupert Murdoch's response to a vague question about "expected losses" for Fox Business Network would result in such, uh, straight-shootedness. "We can talk pretty honestly about it. … It will probably cost us best part of $60 million to $70 million this year."

Which hey, just proves that CNBC and Jim Cramer still lead the day, despite what FBN is trying to sell you through their commercials. Which is the other funny part…although you probably couldn't name one program on Fox Business, you could certainly recognize their ads a mile away, despite the fact that Murdoch says that he's only going to get "aggressive" about getting ads once he hits over 50 million subscribers.

What, so those earlier ads that FBN put on CNBC slamming the station's own Jim Cramer weren't aggressive? Can't wait to see what Murdoch does when he gets out the big guns…if he ever has a chance too.

Remember that part of The Happening, where right before the trees make you kill yourself (ugh) you start talking in this crazy nonsensical syntax, like "I can feel the calculus!" or some shit?

Well, it looks like reporting on Merill Lynch long enough will do that to you too. CNBC's Charlie Gasparino needs to be given a Xanax and maybe some Risperdal, because he's just cracked. Or else he's just pulling a (Jim) Cramer.

Oh Jim Cramer, so angry at hedge funders for playing the market stupidly and picking bad stocks and giving wrong advice:

Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’, told viewers yesterday that many hedge fund strategies have been dead wrong, such as the betting on a Chinese recovery after the Olympics, TheStreet.com, which Cramer co-founded, reports…

The result of hedge funds gone bad is forced selling, he said, and at around 2:45 p.m. each day, hedge funds begin preparing for the next day’s round of redemptions by liquidating their ill-conceived positions.

‘These funds are getting killed,’ he claimed.

The vociferous Cramer also blamed fund-to-fund managers for pressuring their underlying funds for immediate redemptions, forcing managers to think only for the short term.

Um, except hasn't Jim Cramer been so incredibly wrong about the banks and everything these past couple months that the only thing still keeping him on CNBC is his good ratings? Even Fox Business knows what a joke Cramer has become, and bought out time on CNBC to run anti-Cramer commercials.

Next time you want to pass the blame buck, Mr. Mad Money, it would behoove you to go back and watch your March tapes on Bear Stearns, where you announce the company was "not in trouble" literally days before this whole economy meltdown got a kick-start from the Big Bear.

Jim Cramer is to Wall Street what Gallagher was to watermelons. The CNBC Mad Money stock-picker with a penchant for prop comedy has found himself in a loyalty-slump recently, after making bad calls on his show for investing in Bear Stearns and Wachovia, as well as advising viewers to take all the money they need for five years out of the market…a few days before the dow soared up 900+ points.

Fox Business News hasn't ignored this development of their major competitor, and in an effort to draw attention to the Achilles' heel of their opponent's hero, the Roger Ailes' owned station bought time on CNBC's own channel to play Cramer-dissing ads.

Funny thing though: Jim Cramer and CNBC are still kicking Fox's ass:

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Fox and NBC stand at the polar ends of the spectrum in other things besides politics. While Fox might lead in the ratings for news, CNBC —NBC's business channel— is the number one source of financial coverage, and has only been gaining in viewers since the Wall Street fiasco. Fox Business Network has had less success, and recently went over to the dark side of smear ads, like the one to your right that attacks CNBC's Mad Money host Jim Cramer for his poor investment tips, including the sunk Wachovia Bank.

But CNBC flacks are no slouches in the mud-slinging department either, as this counterstrike P.R. statement can attest:

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After that huge story in Vanity Fair about CNBC's Maria Bartiromo catfight with fellow business channel anchor, Erin Burnett, the suits are all a'scramblin to find out who "leaked" the story to Graydon Carter's people.

It's all the Post's fault according to CNBC, though Richard Johnson's people are blaming it on station executives trying to improve ratings by promising some tension between the two.

Let's air on the side of caution here and assume that one of Bartiromo's or Burnett's people — these types always have "people" — leaked the story themselves: adding a little bit of the Sarah Jessica Parker/Kim Cattrall off-camera bitchiness to their persona so more viewers will tune in to witness the fake smiles and facial tics whenever the two are forced to talk to each other.

Being an economist is sort of like being a weatherman: No matter how good you are at your job, in the end it's mostly a game of change + some educated guessing. But CNBC, the creme de la creme of business news, managed to completely miss the economic crisis that was about to befall the American people. And by the time they did happen to warn everyone about Bear Sterns, they were seen as complicit in the collapse of the investment giant. So much so that Vanity Fair fingered CNBC as being "trigger-happy" "players" in the lender's fall from grace.

Still, CNBC is not happy about missing their chance to raise the alarm, and network correspondent Charlie Gasparino wants to confess all his sins before he is read his rights:

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'In fact, the current issue of Vanity Fair features a piece on Burnett and CNBC veteran Maria Bartiromo - the “Money Honey” - titled “Who is Wall Street’s Queen B.?” Burnett said the pair is not at odds. “Her schedule is as crazy as mine is,” Burnett said. “In many cases, we’re like ships passing in the night in terms of our schedules, but we have always, always been friendly.”' [Boston Herald, earlier]

Also, remember when the Post's Page Six was calling Bartiromo not "The Money Honey," but "The Bank Skank"? Oh, the summer of 2007 was such a brighter time.

CNBC has a great combo going: Money and chicks. Sure, the ads on the station's website sometimes gets managing editor Allen Wastler into hot water with the provocative bikini-clad women on a site ostensibly about finance, but come on: hearing about the economy tanking all the time can sometimes be sort of dry.

That's why the NBC biz chan banks on two of its stars to get the movers and shakers moving and shaking over to their channel. Maria Bartiromo (on the left) of Closing Bell and Erin Burnett (on the right) of Street Signs are two of the biggest…uh…assets that business station has going for it. Especially now, when there is an inverse relationship between how bad off the country is financially and the ratings for the network.

But given the primadonna nature of the station's leading ladies, it was only a matter of time before the rumored catfight between Maria "The Money Honey" and Erin "Street Sweetie" made its way into the pages of Graydon Carter's baby. Because he likes celebrities, beautiful people, and money.

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If you're wondering why the gift shops at LaGuardia seem a little less snow globe and keychain oriented and a little more hellbent on getting you to watch The O'Reilly Factor, it's not your Murdoch-induced paranoia or the Ambien kicking in preemptively. Brands like USA Today, CNBC and Fox News are outsourcing their brand names to retail shops in airport lounges that exclusively feature items bearing the corporate watermark.

Two possible reasons for the baffling business tactic:

1) The decline in viewership, for both television and glossies, has media corporations looking to expand their names into wholesale businesses as a way to raise revenue and

2) September 11th:

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Exhausted with crapping on MSNBC, News Corp.'s attack dog megaphone Page Six goes after 30 Rock's biz network: 'THE top talents at CNBC are battling over a billboard. A network insider tells us Maria Bartiromo, Suze Orman and Donny Deutsch "all want their pictures on CNBC's billboard overlooking the West Side Highway, and there's always a lot of fighting and lobbying behind the scenes over it. They're like a bunch of prima donnas." A CNBC flack denied any rivalry and insisted all three have had their mugs featured on the board in the last year.'

This is funny, because:

Nielsen, the Big Brother-esque media group that measures television consumption, is currently asking panel members to carry around teeny-tiny audio devices that react to "digital signals of audio media" to measure the amount of television being watched outside the home.

What does this mean for you? Once these numbers come out, Nielsen, which is responsible for all media ratings (when's the last time someone cited TNS' numbers?), will be able to tell you how much television we're sneaking in when away from our living rooms. The hours you waste watching Adult Swim at the office on your MacBook? Suddenly quantifiable!

And of course, you know what network whines all the time about not being able to accurately determine their viewership:

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Allen Wastler, the managing editor of CNBC.com, just got done with a fireside chat about how some guests of the network follow up their interviews by asking them to be pulled from the site's archives. Now Wastler is offering another missive, and this one's of the apologetic variety, as in: Sorry visitors to CNBC.com are met with ads "showing women unbuttoning sweaters and listing mileage to ladies looking for a date. And the others showing come-hither countenances and blaring 'NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED.'" And it's not just unfortunate contextual advertising that's to blame, but "networks, where inventory is sold off to middlemen who represent a variety of advertisers. You get all sorts of strange ads running through. We had ones for nipple pads once. You wouldn't usually expect that with your bond rates, would you?"

Except, actually, yes:

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Now On NBC: beach volleyball. On MSNBC: fencing. On CNBC: Glorified girdle infomercial Look Thinner Instantly.

Who hasn't done an on-air appearance they've come to regret? At the top, there are presidential candidates like John McCain who wish certain CNN interviews would disappear. Toward the bottom, there are the talking heads cable networks always call upon to weigh in on Topics A, B, and C. Thanks to the magical ways of the Internet, after these live interview air, they're often archived on the network's website for future reference. CNBC certainly follows that practice. Which means it's opened itself up to on-air guests phoning in later to ask that their interview be yanked from the website, perhaps because they said something inaccurate — or perhaps because they didn't like the way they looked that day.

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"Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that FBN averaged 8,000 viewers during daytime programming and 20,000 viewers in primetime in the first three weeks of July. That's a little better than the numbers reported at the start of the year, when the channel was reaching 6,000 viewers during the day and 15,000 in the evening. But at that rate of growth, it will be another 3,588 weeks, or 69 years, before FBN matches CNBC's daytime audience of 284,000. By then, Murdoch will be 146 years old, and on his seventh wife, if current trends hold (and assuming no growth in CNBC's numbers)." [Portfolio]

Though the Fox Business Network has seen a "modest improvement" in its ratings since the channel launched in October — up from an average of 6,000 daytime viewers to 8,000 — it's not exactly a true competitor to CNBC yet. So what makes another upstart think it can take on the business TV king? Chutzpah, money, and a leap of faith. Thomson Reuters appears to have all three.

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