Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: The Market's Wrecking Crew (Final)

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "Guys in pajamas have hijacked our markets," Jim Cramer told a live studio audience on a special "Family Affair" edition of his "Mad Money" TV show Thursday.

He said high-frequency flash traders, which now make up 80% of all market volume, are the ones moving stocks, and they're focused on all the wrong data.

Cramer said the markets should've been crushed today on the heels of all the bad economic news, including dismal unemployment numbers and a Philly Fed Index showing disappointing economic activity in the mid-Atlantic. That, he said, coupled with the continued oil spill in the Gulf should have sent the markets plummeting. But they didn't.

Cramer said the reasons behind today's move are the flash traders, the "guys in pajamas" as he called them, that trade all stocks as commodities. "These guys don't own stocks," he said, "they don't even rent them." Instead, he said they merely hijack them for a few hours, or sometimes minutes, to do their bidding, then dump them back into the pool.

What were the flash traders looking at today that made them so bullish? Cramer said it's the euro, as seen in the CurrencyShares Euro ETF (FXE). Cramer said the flash traders are trading off that single chart, not realizing that a strong euro only comes on the heels of a limp U.S. economy.

"These guys are betting on the wrong things," said Cramer, and it will eventually come back to bite them. He pleaded for members of Congress, like Senator Ted Kaufman (D., Del) who appeared on "Mad Money" Wednesday, to bring back integrity and parity to the markets by reigning in flash trading.