Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

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:

• the safety of staples,
• a lack of clarity, and
• the peril of owning stocks at all.

Click here for information on RealMoney, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's -- and reader comments -- in real time.

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Nothing Else Working? Look to the Staples
Posted at 11:02 a.m., Feb. 23, 2009

A return to the soft goods and staples? One look at your screen today shows that the market has lost faith in a host of sectors. Even in declining flows of cash into equities, the money has to go somewhere. I think it is flowing back to the staples.

First, the case against the other large S&P areas.

1. The uncertainty in the common stock of the financials has turned portfolio managers on to the sell side endlessly. As you can tell from the misdirection in the financials that the government is offering, it is impossible to figure out the worth of the common stock. So, with the exception of Morgan Stanley (MS Quote), Goldman Sachs (GS Quote), Visa (V Quote) and MasterCard (MA Quote), there is no way a responsible portfolio manager can initiate new positions in the group, even if JPMorgan (JPM Quote) and Wells (WFC Quote) seem dirt cheap. This is all Geithner's fault, but there isn't much we can do about it. The destruction of the insurers -- Hartford (HIG Quote), MetLife (MET Quote), Prudential (PRU Quote), Lincoln National (LNC Quote), Manulife Financial (MFC Quote), Genworth (GNW Quote), Principal (PFG Quote) -- remains one of the most astoundingly horrible sectors of the market.

2. The early-cycle stocks have simply been demolished on the worries about unemployment and the lack of credit. The end of the auto industry as we know it has further damaged the group and the bogus infrastructure story from the stimulus bill is revealing the machinery stocks as companies without catalysts. Same goes for steel, which is in free fall today.