The Cut Will Help, But ...

The reason you want to get ahead of the curve is that you don't want to come in and cut rates a week before a Fed meeting on a day when the futures are down huge.

You don't want to be seen as someone who responds to the futures.

Yet that's what just happened.

I hate being in the "too little, too late" camp. This cut will help some refinance. But if consumers had been able to finance earlier, we would not have these astonishing defaults.

The real issue here is -- will it save Countrywide (CFC - commentary - Cramer's Take) or Washington Mutual (WM - commentary - Cramer's Take). The answer is simple: They have a better chance surviving today than they did yesterday,

And in the end, that's good.

They should have gone a point instead of 0.75 -- that would have been the real deal, because that, at last, was more than expected. But it is difficult to have told The Wall Street Journal three weeks ago that inflation problems are perhaps the more important issue and then cut a full point.

Again, though, three-quarters of a point beats nothing.

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

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