Cramer: Ending an Awful Year

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Send out the clowns. That's how I am looking at 2008.

The people who got us in this mess, whether it be Chris Cox -- last-minute stifling of any accounting hopes ... thanks, Chris! -- or the incredibly overrated and somehow revered Hank Paulson, and, most important, President Bush. Not for a minute did that man do anything to get us out of this jam. It is telling that when people speak of the outgoing administration on Wall Street, they never speak of Bush. It's all Paulson and some Bernanke, a Bush appointee. But in the biggest economic collapse statistically since the Great Depression, the president has played no role and clearly doesn't understand most if not all that is happening around him.

When we speak of the next administration and domestic policy, it is clear that we are going to speak about President Obama. He won't fob it off or deny what's happening. And remember, this crisis got very deep because the man at the top said the fundamentals were sound, and repeated that over and over and over, right up until the beginning of 2008, which is why things are as horrible as they are. And they are horrible. The president's advisers, no doubt cowed by a clueless chief, never wanted to differ, and Bernanke reminds me of one of those academics around presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a brilliant man who has gotten us into the equivalent of a domestic Vietnam. He's finally bombing the heck out of the economy, but it was too late, and now a new administration has to clean up his and Paulson's and Bush's mess for him.

I don't think we are going to have a repeat of '32; in fact, the comparisons are absurd. I would call what we are going to have a "garden-variety depression," if the term wasn't such an oxymoron. Put simply, though, we are at a loss for comparisons between the recessions we have had since he Great Depression and now, so the lack of analogues brings us to the '32 debacle. Suffice it to say that we are nowhere near that era when it comes to any piece of the data: production, unemployment, retail sales, GDP -- none of them. So the comparison is fatuous. But we are well past the data of the recessions of at least my lifetime, albeit without the inflation of the Carter period. In fact, that's a more apt comparison if we need one, of the depth of trouble we are in.