Cramer: Why the Market's Holding Its Ground

This column was originally published on RealMoney on March 18 at 3:58 p.m. ET. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers. For more information about subscribing to RealMoney, please click here.

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With analysts believing that crummy undocumented loan problems have already seeped into less-crummy loans, with the bears contending that inflation is raging, with everybody arguing that the Fed is boxed in, the question isn't how far the market's going to go down, but why it hasn't cracked already.

Isn't that the real question? What's with the market anyway? Doesn't it know that it is supposed to go down, either in the form of a series of down-100-to-200 days or in a straight line as it did in 1987, or 1997, or 1998 or 2001? What gives?

Perhaps, at least when it comes to the Dow, there are peculiar factors buoying most of the index. It's time for a special, end-of-quarter analysis of why the market is so resilient despite end-of-the-world pressures from residential mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, a belief that Blackstone thinks it is the top, horrible CPI and PPI, a crippled president, rate hikes in China and the rest of the world and an overall belief that the smart money says were are going to crash.

It's time to figure out why we haven't repealed the whole move from September and then some. I believes the answer lies, as is so often the case, in the components themselves.

So let's look at them to see why we have that resilience, or at least, where we could stop if the market's bears tag-team the ETFs to take the index below where the components want to go.

1. Alcoa(AA Quote) stays stubbornly in the low $30s even though it was back at $26 in the fall. I think that's because Alcoa is too much of a bargain for CVRD(RIO Quote), BHP(BHP Quote) and Rio Tinto(RTP Quote), all of which at one time or another coveted this company. And why not?