The Selling's Not Done

The shorts must have just gone on "ease watch." You can tell what that is. Some devastating news will come out, say, about once-proud Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS - commentary - Cramer's Take), some ratings downgrade, and boom, Britain is hit for a full percentage point decline. Then, as if by magic, it rallies almost back to unchanged as the shorts don't want to be hung before worldwide rate cuts.

I always thought this behavior was curious because I don't know of a short-seller who thinks that intervention even matters, or says it doesn't matter, for that matter!

In fact, though I think it can matter not so much to our country, it does matter to those countries in Europe that really would be doing well if money weren't so tight. Our markets lost a ready source of cash and business when Europe went away, particularly upon the disappearance of China from the world's economies.

Now, of all of the new measures I like hearing, the commercial paper intervention is intriguing as the government substitutes itself for buyers for this important funding. But again, I come back to the notion that we can't really be two sides of everything, can we?

Can we really have the Fed define all markets? Look, I get the real estate market because the risk there is that the Fed owns the house and sits on it or owns the CDO until it works its way out of being a CDO.

But we can't restore confidence in commercial paper until we restore confidence that solvency and seizing are off the table. I thought it unconscionable that the FDIC didn't come out Monday and say, "We are not going to seize Sovereign (SOV - commentary - Cramer's Take) or Nat City (NCC - commentary - Cramer's Take) or anyone else for that matter, because we are going to let TARP take care of it."

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