Cramer: This Time, Bad Is Just Bad

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Sometimes it is so bad that it is BAD! Don't laugh at that seeming bit of counterintuitive logic. Every investment professional knows that because of the way economic cycles and central banks work, you are often looking for signs of such stress and negativity that it is so bad it is GOOD because of what the banks can do and what a bottom looks like.

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This time it hasn't worked out that way. This time, what's bad is bad and getting worse. This weekend, David Carr in The New York Times wrote an excellent piece about the mistake of looking for a silver lining, something that news media does.

The piece was caustic and skeptical -- rightly so, as you have to ask yourself, "Is it even worth it to look for the silver lining?" As the piece was about my friends on "Power Lunch" at CNBC interviewing two noted bears, I found the logic even more poignant than Carr might have realized.

That's because it has always paid, in the last 28 years, to look for the silver lining. Empirically, it has paid. Historically, if you look at all the work Jeremy Siegel did in Stocks for the Long Run, it has paid. The attitude of the hosts toward the bears, one of skepticism, has been the most intelligent approach to take since September 1981, a really long time to measure things.

But as we look today, with the so many of the Dow stocks alone threatening to be reorganized (see my piece from yesterday) and layer on the fact that the U.S. is probably in better shape than most of the world, you come to a brutal conclusion that we are simply in the prelude still, which is why -- much to the chagrin of the hedge fund community -- the outperformance, as meager as it is, has come from the stable growers, particularly in the health care segment, which cannot be stopped unless you are willing to let people die, something that has always trumped the cycle and always will. (See Abbott (ABT Quote), Boston Scientific (BSX Quote), St. Jude (STJ Quote), UnitedHealth (UNH Quote), Aetna (AET Quote), Cephalon (CEPH Quote), Genzyme (GENZ Quote) and Gilead (GILD Quote).)