Ho Hum, Another Bad Jobs Number

Shocking!

Oh please, just another bad employment number, just another reason the Fed should be more concerned with loosening rather than tightening now that the dollar is soaring and commodities are falling apart. But Bernanke's been silent, and the other Fed governors blather about inflation pressures even though the futures say otherwise.

Today's more important calls are Goldman's downgrade of Merrill (MER) to "sell" -- of course there are more writedowns, silly -- and the far more important bill coming due AIG (AIG) courtesy of Morgan Stanley's research. We have to be careful with Morgan Stanley's research on the issue, though, because the analyst actually was foolish enough to have a "buy" on this piece of junk before his downgrade. Plus, the analyst is only using a $10 billion to $15 billion writedown estimate. Anyone who has attempted to understand the derivatives issues for Europe is swamped -- it's a moving target -- but I would be shocked if the capital raise needed is less than $20 billion; remember, they have no deposit base.

These calls are really awful for another reason: Both of these reports could have come out two days ago when the stocks were in rally mode. I don't know what happened "in the committee," but it looks like both of these analysts waited until the bears started swarming to throw some raw meat on the table.

Remember my view: AIG is in real trouble, along with Ford (F), Fannie (FNM) (although doing better than Freddie (FRE)), Washington Mutual (WM) (although not as worried now that the FDIC is taking over failed banks and keeping the bad loans and selling the deposits), Citigroup (C) and Lehman (LEH). I expect Citi to take big writedowns after its German division is sold, and I expect Lehman to announce something before it reports that will keep the firm in business.

But the employment number is strictly par for the course. Gold should be down big, not up. It will go down. And rates will go still lower.

At the time of publication, Cramer was long Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

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