Consider the Positives

When we get a down day we get a definitive story, THE story, the one that worries everyone. Two weeks ago we had one about the suddenly dangerous Treasury bill market. As someone who sold Treasury bills when they were at 14%, I still can't get nervous at 4%. And the U.S. had a AAA rating when we were hawking them.

Yet, that was the fear. OK, I'm shaking.

I make no mistake that I am worried about the Obama agenda because he does not have a check in Congress. He actually gets it done. He is certainly not the friend of business, and his best job creation so far is the prolongation of the car agony to keep people at work. Until new weekly unemployment claims go below 600,000, those who proclaim the recession over are simply foolish. It's funny -- the guys who say it are the same guys who thought that Bernanke should have been raising rates, not lowering them. They never admit they are wrong,

I do a whole segment each week just talking about where I am wrong. Maybe that's one of the reasons that I am so easy to criticize. They can say, "Look how wrong he was." And I give them ammo. But that's simply because I am from a hedge fund culture where wrong meant lost money and lost money meant failure and failure meant take your clients or job away and no way to meet payroll.

Pretty simple.

To me, what we should have been focusing on is the countdown to raise more money at the bank level and how we are at the lowly Fifth Third (FITB - commentary - Trade Now) level, and how most banks are still above where the deals occurred (with the big outlier being Capital One (COF - commentary - Trade Now) because of the president's endless protestations against them). We ignore Toll's (TOL - commentary - Trade Now) call that the bottom is at hand, which occurred this period. We pass over some huge upside retail surprises as if they didn't happen. Ross Stores (ROST - commentary - Trade Now) does matter. So does Macy's (M - commentary - Trade Now). We look the other way at the dollar's decline when it will reverse many firms' earnings problems.

Again, there are plenty of things wrong, most importantly a president who is not creating enough jobs to offset an agenda that can cost a lot of jobs and a recession that is not ending anytime soon. That makes an assault to higher levels problematic.

But if you told me three weeks ago that every major bank would need capital and then be able to raise capital, I would have said you were crazy.

I would have been too bearish, and it is very easy to be bearish.

It's important to keep that in perspective when you panic on the AAA rating of our nation.

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

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