'Not Bad' May Just Be Good Enough Here

If you were to tell me that business around the world dropped 30% in one quarter -- something that you could argue truly did occur -- I would expect gigantic losses from most industrial companies. They have giant fixed costs that they can't possibly curtail in time to save the quarter, and they have no ability to suddenly start saving money in this environment.

Instead, though, we see profits -- profits like those just reported by Du Pont (DD - commentary - Cramer's Take), which put up a number that simply wasn't that bad. That's the best way to describe it: not bad. Same with United Tech (UTX - commentary - Cramer's Take). Not bad. We also saw not bad numbers from Emerson (EMR - commentary - Cramer's Take), PPG (PPG - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Illinois Tool Works (ITW - commentary - Cramer's Take) last week -- not bad, meaning simply these big companies didn't swing to colossal losses as could have been expected. Let's include IBM (IBM - commentary - Cramer's Take) in that parade, too. Think about it: Should these companies be making any money at all in this environment?

Some companies can't pull it off like you would like to see in this down-30% environment. Eaton (ETN - commentary - Cramer's Take) truly didn't do a good job in the quarter even as Sandy Cutler, the CEO, tried to be relentlessly upbeat about earnings.

But then take Halliburton (HAL - commentary - Cramer's Take). Drilling just stopped in this country to hear them talk, but how did they do? They made a lot of money.

I don't think people remember or understand previous downturns, where we would have these swings for industrial companies that would produce red ink immediately upon the kind of colossal reduction in business worldwide. These are depression numbers, and the companies are putting up slowdown numbers, which is why Dow 6300 still looks like a bottom.

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