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Jim Cramer
Jim Cramer fills his blog on RealMoney every day with his up-to-the-minute reactions to what's happening in the market and his legendary ahead-of-the-crowd ideas. This week he blogged on:
Click here for information on RealMoney.com, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.Housing Crisis Just Beginning
Originally published on Aug. 27 at 6:26 p.m. EDT Too many stories saying the crisis has past. That's why I think the banks got whipped. What the sellers may not realize is that 1) the hedge fund crisis is past, but 2) the housing crisis is just beginning. The housing crisis is all resets and evictions. It's something that is beginning to dawn on people at the highest levels -- great piece by Larry Summers in the FT -- that the woes are too big for individuals to handle. The most important thing you can do right now is go listen to that Toll(TOL Quote) call, and not just because there is a hysterical interaction between Doug Kass and Bob Toll. It is not clear how many homebuilders will make it through this period, but the one that I am sure about is Toll, because it builds houses that only people who are wealthy or at least upper-middle-class can afford. Toll can help you get a loan. Its buyers have a miraculously low default rate. They are good bets. That's the good news. The bad news is that almost everyone else is a bad bet, and unless you have an unregulated market, like we had, in which you can trick people into taking crummy loans and then pawn them off in a package to some German bank, you are not going to get loans for these people at prices they can afford. I have read at least a half dozen articles about how things are finally getting better, and I find myself thinking, Where are they getting that? My certainty about the Fed has to do with the fact that there is not a shred of evidence that things are getting better, and I am not one of those people who is willing to say, "Nobody thinks it is going to bottom, so it must be able to bottom." That's like saying you can see the bottom of the Marianas Trench when no one else can. You can't. I reiterate that when this era is through, you will have some homebuilders that won't make it, and I think that two of them will be Standard Pacific(SPF Quote) and Beazer(BZH Quote). At least let's wait until that happens before we say "the bottom is here" like so many others seem to be willing to do now. As long as I hear that kind of talk, we will not have a good market. Good news is bad news now when we are in a moment in which the bias has switched to being worried about growth and not inflation. Not a bad market though. Just a mark-time market. At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in any of the stocks mentioned in this post.Think About What Not to Sell
Originally published on Aug. 29 at 10:10 a.m. EDT Trust it? Trust what? The builders? The bankers? Anything financial? This is a seasonably good time, but that was wrecked Tuesday. The anemic bounce in the financials may return. At least the group didn't rip upward at the open, which would have been deadly. How about looking at it like this: what not to sell? I wouldn't sell semis or networkers, like the Ciscos(CSCO Quote), because the financial business, where the weakness is, won't affect them much. I wouldn't sell ag. I wouldn't sell oil. And I wouldn't sell health care; those names keep catching bids. Notice that Schering-Plough(SGP Quote) is still above its secondary offering price. Notice that Celgene(CELG Quote) hangs in. And they can't crush the device companies or the health care cost-containers -- you have to like the Medcos(MHS Quote) of the world, and let's lump in CVS(CVS Quote), for that matter. I have to admit that after Tuesday's shellacking I was drawn to Goldman Sachs(GS Quote). I also thought that it was intriguing that they got to the Northern Trusts(NTRS Quote) and the State Streets(STT Quote) and the Bank of New Yorks(BK Quote) Tuesday, traditional repositories of safety in the banking world. When they get to Chubb(CB Quote), my insurance gold standard, we'll have to believe it has at last run its course. Why Goldman? I think it is going down at this point because you can raise a lot of capital selling it. At last, if you believe the numbers, it's cheap enough to start buying. Goldman's not defenseless like a State Street and it is more nimble. Of course all of this revolves around whatever is AAA-rated. I would look at it like this: If you are worried that a company has something to do with AAA-rated bonds, stay away from it for now until we see genuine evidence that the contagion stopped somewhere. I know the market thinks it stops nowhere, so that's important. All in all, I think the dark day that was Tuesday has produced hope that Ben Bernanke will accelerate his rate cuts or make them bigger. I know that there are good people on this site who believe the prospect of a cut doesn't matter. I ask, did you just pass up the 800-point rally we had off the bottom? Did it mean nothing to you? And aren't you confusing the fundamentals with the stock prices, which, at fulcrum moments, is just a bad move? I think you are. And I am losing patience with those who tell us that we can't bail out this guy or that guy. At this point I could care less if we bailed out the people at NovaStar(NFI Quote). That's how bad things really are and how in need of relief we are. I also am beginning to resent those who confuse relief for trading desks with relief for the 310 million people who don't work on trading desks. They matter, too.Please note that due to factors including low market capitalization and/or insufficient public float, we consider NovaStar to be a small-cap stock. You should be aware that such stocks are subject to more risk than stocks of larger companies, including greater volatility, lower liquidity and less publicly available information, and that postings such as this one can have an effect on their stock prices. At the time of publication, Cramer was long CVS and Goldman Sachs.
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