Cramer: We're in 1987 Mode

This post appeared earlier today on RealMoney. Click here for a free trial, and enjoy incisive commentary all day, every day.

It's time to talk turkey about the prices on your screen and recall another time when things felt like this -- the crash of 1987. In 1987, we believed that all the major firms in the brokerage industry were going to go belly-up. Many of them were not in compliance with paperwork, others were simply not even picking up the phone. It felt like the end of the world. It wasn't. But it was eerie.

We are in that mode again. I don't think anyone looking at Morgan Stanley (MS Quote) or Goldman Sachs (GS Quote) today would dispute that. These companies are clearly reflecting that they are in severe straits, much worse than I think they are. In many ways, this time it is worse than 1987 because AIG (AIG Quote) and Fannie (FNM Quote) and Freddie (FRE Quote) and Lehman (LEH Quote) still haven't been sorted through. We have too many aftershocks that we must worry about, and there is too much damage in the system. Plus, there is now a sense that the U.S. government has become a cartoon government with a cartoon currency and a cartoon Fed. No rate cut? Oh my! How wrong!! ...