On the Brink: Holding Above the Lows

Today's a humongously important markup day. It's a major way to be able to show people that the summer wasn't a total disaster so they don't ask for their money after Labor Day. Plus, we could have that weird moment where oil rallies and takes up all of the oils, and then oil stalls and everything else goes up. Nice for a change. And the markup will be made easy today, because you can interpret the GDP number as growth without inflation -- ideal for buying financials and techs!

If you are like me, you have been numbed by the viciousness of this market. You simply expect the worst every day from whatever you liked the day before. So any respite feels like a setup for the next big disappointment. The benign moments are cherished, and you try to store them up for the bank failures and commodity spikes of the next few weeks.

Still, I can't help feel that the longer we hang up here, the more time we put in away from the July 15 lows, the longer people who put in money on the Merrill Lynch (MER Quote - Cramer on MER - Stock Picks) deal -- a defining deal, because it is the only one that worked! -- the more it is likely that the center will hold and financial destruction could be abating.

Case in point: MBIA (MBI Quote - Cramer on MBI - Stock Picks). Any reasonable person could have said, "That company is insolvent" or "It's a goner," and then considered all of the consequences of it going to zero and reneging on its contracts. Now, somehow, we see that "insolvent" doesn't mean anything. It came back to life and won a big piece of business. It's off the critical list whether it should be or not. Any movement of a financial entity off the critical list and into "good condition" means July 15 becomes more of a memory.

The companies on the brink -- WaMu (WM Quote - Cramer on WM - Stock Picks), Fannie (FNM Quote - Cramer on FNM - Stock Picks) and Freddie (FRE Quote - Cramer on FRE - Stock Picks), Citigroup (C Quote - Cramer on C - Stock Picks), AIG (AIG Quote - Cramer on AIG - Stock Picks), Lehman (LEH Quote - Cramer on LEH - Stock Picks), Ford (F Quote - Cramer on F - Stock Picks) and GM (GM Quote - Cramer on GM - Stock Picks) -- are still on the brink, but the more days that go by without outright chaos are days that they can trick their way into getting more capital or forbearance, and July 15 will be a bottom for them as well as for so many others, from oil users to retailers to incredibly resilient housing stocks.

Capital can get rebuilt if there is less visible chaos. And that's what it feels like right now.

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