Strong Dollar Hurts the Global Players

Darned dollar's starting to kill the translaters, the big overseas players. Schering-Plough (SGP - commentary - Cramer's Take) has tried hard to build its business overseas, and boom! Look at that stock after a terrific quarter by any stretch of the imagination. Merck's (MRK - commentary - Cramer's Take) getting crushed, too, and that's a huge global company.

But three that might make sense here are Altria (MO - commentary - Cramer's Take), General Mills (GIS - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Unilever (UN - commentary - Cramer's Take). Altria, now somewhat brilliantly, sold the overseas business. It's the Marlboro man, not the euro man, and the numbers are safe. General Mills, unlike Kellogg (K - commentary - Cramer's Take), isn't big in Europe and its expansion is in China. But it is still largely U.S., which sure is fabulous right now. And Unilever is a strong dollar winner with its translation.

We are going to see numbers come down huge soon on this dollar -- and you are also seeing gold get crushed as people buy back their dollar shorts and sell gold, as Europe's getting much weaker than the U.S.

The trend's not over. And if the Europeans don't cut rates, you are going to want to be long GIS/short K, long MO/short Philip Morris (PM - commentary - Cramer's Take) as great trades here. Oh, and to be sure, while I believe the prescription data may show some economic weakness as the Journal said, we are more socialized in medicine than the figures let on. Be more worried about the government bargaining over prices with drug companies than about economic weakness, which I regard as a bit of a canard. The publicity on certain drugs that were big sellers simply hasn't been great, and I think that's a more important theory.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long General Mills, Altria and Unilever.

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