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:
- steel prices,
- the dichotomy in natural gas, and
- separating the wheat from the chaff.
A Decline in Steel Prices Would Be Huge Originally published on Tuesday, Sept. 2, at 9:28 a.m. EDT Is steel next to come down? This morning's commodity collapse is by no means limited to oil. We have everything from palm oil to platinum on the way down, and I have to believe that steel -- or at least the raw ingredients of steel -- can't be far away from a decline. I can't stress how important this all is for the heavy-equipment makers like Caterpillar (CAT Quote - Cramer on CAT - Stock Picks) or Deere (DE Quote - Cramer on DE - Stock Picks) -- they started to react to it last week -- or even for the Whirlpools (WHR Quote - Cramer on WHR - Stock Picks) of the world that need steel. Certainly for the carmakers and the aircraft makers -- I believe if Boeing (BA Quote - Cramer on BA - Stock Picks) takes it to the strikers, you might have even more of a trade coming. Steel pricing has bedeviled everything from commercial construction to the building of rigs for the oil companies. It has also been crimping the pipeline business. So many companies have had to raise prices because of steel that it is a leading cause of the remaining parts of inflation. Look for this to be the next big story. We know that Nucor's (NUE Quote - Cramer on NUE - Stock Picks) stock price has forecast this decline. While the long term could see steel shortages now and then -- and we haven't had many Greenfield mills built in years -- you can tell when the pressure's beginning to subside.
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