Solid Yields Can't Protect Equities

You can't even find protection in yields these days. It just went away. Perhaps we will get it if Sen. Obama gets elected. Perhaps with higher rates. Perhaps with the downfall of the high-yielding American financials. (Nice discussion of the lack of dividend safety courtesy of the man who knows more about dividends than anyone, Dave Peltier, in the Columnist Conversation last week.)

For ages, it seemed you could get to a magic number, typically 4% yield, where stocks would bounce, or at least be given a parachute that opened for a gentle landing.

Last week that parachute failed. You have stocks like Con Ed (ED - commentary - Cramer's Take) just getting trashed here, pushing the yield to 6%. You have stocks like Weyerhauser (WY - commentary - Cramer's Take), Carnival Cruise (CCL - commentary - Cramer's Take), Gannett (GCI - commentary - Cramer's Take), just slicing through the protection. The former's got cyclicality, the middle's got consumer and fuel worries, and the latter is in secular. But they all have no trouble paying the dividend.

Or consider Verizon (VZ - commentary - Cramer's Take) and AT&T (T - commentary - Cramer's Take). The first is at a 5% yield, the other is almost there. No one questions their ability to support that dividend.

I am not counting ANY of the 7-8-9-10 percenters in the financials. Anything north of 4% in that group has turned toxic.

I am saying that it is clear from these declines that something's about to give: bond yields going through the roof? A recession so severe that it threatens outfits like Con Edison? Or perhaps just a simple reversion to the old tax code, something that Obama wants that could easily be passed by a Democratic Congress.

One of these three, if not all three, is the culprit. If it is one, it might be possible to handle a decline of only about 5% from here. If it is all three, then the decline will not stop there.

Of all the things I see out there other than the collapse of almost all of the major banks, I think it is the sudden change in defense -- these stocks just don't hold up despite how much they are paying you to hold them -- that is most worrisome.

Because if these yields don't stop these stocks from going down as fast as they have been, I don't know what will!

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.

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