Update: we decided it may be an opportune time to remind readers of this particular fact, not opinion, not propaganda, not insinuation.

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By now it is well known that the ubiquity of central planning (not to mention the persistent threat of HFT flash crashes as exhibited by yesterday's twitter-driven #Hash crash) in capital "markets", has made trading stocks in a rigged casino a sucker's game - one that retail investors have decided to shun, and nearly 5 years after Lehman have still to come back in any size to the stock market.

One of the main, unintended consequences of this development to prop up markets at all costs, even if it means removing all logic and reliance on fundamental data, has been the complete evaporation of interest in any finance-related media, forcing the bulk of financial outlets to rely on such cheap gimmicks as slideshows, pictures of kittens, trolling and generally hiring liberal arts majors straight out of school to copy and paste articles while paying them minimum wage, and providing absolutely no insight (and then wondering why the Series ZZ preferred investors will never get their money back, let alone the A round).

However, nowhere is this more obvious than in the relentless imploding viewership of once financial media titan, CNBC, which lately has become a sad, one-sided caricature of its once informative self, whose only agenda is to get the most marginal Joe Sixpack to dump his hard-earned cash into 100x P/E stocks, and where according to data from Nielsen Media Research, the total and demographic (25-54) viewership during the prime time segment (9:30am - 5:00 pm) just tumbled to 216K and 40K - the lowest recorded viewership since mid 2005 and sliding.

So why the relentless collapse in CNBC viewers, which in turns leads to plunging ad revenues (aside from our observations from last summer on just this topic) and which has forced the station to even resort to muppets as a cheap ratings-boosting gimmick? Perhaps it has something to do with outbursts like this, where 13 minutes into the clip, one Jim Cramer tells the camera point blank when discussing daily market gyrations, and with absolutely no remorse, that "i want everyone to play that game at home by recognizing that fraud is part of the equation and the government cannot stop it."

That's right: on one hand CNBC's most overcaffeinated anchor admits that the market is nothing but uncontrollable fraud, and on the other he beckons viewers and listeners, usually with the assistance of assorted bovine sounds, to "buy, buy, buy."

Perhaps the greater fool is truly dead, or simply the embedded hypocrisy of the CNBC stock "infomercial" is so transparent that nobody really cares what the Comcast subsidiary's paid entertainers have to say any more.