Sneaky Rally; Wells Fargo Needs Outside Help -- Jim Cramer's Top Thoughts
Here are Jim Cramer's top thoughts on some of the biggest stories of the week.
Jim Cramer: Good News Stirs a Sneaky Rally
There's a nice sneaking rally right now, which seems to be based on successful rescue attempts and a quiet response to North Korea.
For me, that means the money can flow back to tech and healthcare -- taking a pass on retail and oil and financials, save the usual fintechs: MasterCard (MA) - Get Report and Visa (V) - Get Report .
We are also seeing some stocks that are just too strong for their own good. Once again, Bristol-Myers (BMY) - Get Report keeps going higher based on nothing at all. Disney (DIS) - Get Report seems to be stuck at a level from which it won't go down. Nvidia (NVDA) - Get Report feels firm. The video game stocks are excellent.
I am waiting for a big call made for multinationals based on the weakness of the dollar, but it makes so much sense to make.
Lam (LRCX) - Get Report and Micron (MU) - Get Report remained loved after being hated. When will Broadcom (AVGO) - Get Report turn? Soon, I think. Maybe today. (Nvidia and Broadcom are part of TheStreet's Action Alerts PLUS portfolio.)
The bulls took this one. They made the bears eat some real crow.
More From Jim Cramer
- Cramer: A Micron Technology Breakout Would Be a Win for Technology Stocks
- Cramer: Fantasy Shmantasy -- Let's Get Real With These Stock Picks
- Jim Cramer on Wells Fargo, Costco, Five Below, General Electric, Uber, FMC Corp, Starbucks and Analog Devices
Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, is long AVGO and NVDA.
Originallypublished Aug. 29 at 3:23 p.m. EDT.
Jim Cramer: Wells Fargo Needs Outside Leadership
It's time for a new board and perhaps a new chief executive officer at Wells Fargo (WFC) - Get Report now that we have found that there were 67% more fraudulent accounts created to inflate earnings than previously thought.
The addition of 1.4 million more instances of false account creation, bringing the total to 3.5 million, is so outrageous that it's time to bring in a special master, someone appointed by a court, to oversee this bank to be sure it is not a rogue operation. I am talking like something akin to the ongoing oversight the federal government has of the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. Similar to that situation, the government finally decided it just wasn't good enough to warn or cajole, someone had to be put inside the organization to be sure it didn't happen again.
Now Wells, unlike the Teamsters' pension plan, is a publicly traded company with a real board of a directors and a real CEO. The problem for me is what kind of oversight was the board providing and is it really right to have a CEO from another part of Wells? Shouldn't an outsider have been picked who could most certainly run a more thorough investigation. The Three Stooges could do a better job. And to think that the NFL spent months investigating Inflagate with a real firm, Paul Weiss, doing the investigating, is to remind you how little oversight the banks really have. They are so trusted that no one in the law and order side of the feds seems to realize how bad exactly this is.
More From Jim Cramer
- Cramer: A Micron Technology Breakout Would Be a Win for Technology Stocks
- Cramer: Fantasy Shmantasy -- Let's Get Real With These Stock Picks
- Jim Cramer on Wells Fargo, Costco, Five Below, General Electric, Uber, FMC Corp, Starbucks and Analog Devices
It's almost as if because Warren Buffett, the biggest shareholder, seems okay with it beyond talking about cockroaches, all is well. Our system punishes petty theft harder than it is punishing Wells.
I want a special master because I have to believe there is something so wrong, so deeply embedded in the culture of this bank that I do not think anything the company says can be trusted, an odd position given that it is a gigantic bank entrusted with people's life savings. This bank has 165 million accounts and I am sure the investigators from the first investigation will moan about how hard the investigation was to do because there were so many accounts. I wonder if they even are embarrassed, that's how lackadaisical this whole episode appears to be.
I have to ask, what's wrong with a special master coming in and replacing the board of directors? What's wrong with examining the notion that Tim Sloan shouldn't be in his job given that, even though he ran a different division, perhaps the culture extended to that division? Do we know? What are we doing, taking this bank's word for it the way we took their word on the first investigation.
Now here's what really will happen: nothing. I am sure this Justice Department will not care. I am sure no one will listen to the people in Congress calling for an investigation because they will all be Democrats who are helpless. I am sure that neither the board nor the offending executives will be held to account, because that's not the way America works. Instead the company fires some bad apples and business continues apace even as it was the culture to incentivize what we now know was fraudulent behavior. How shameful. And how condoned by the Justice Department which is the only organization that can step in to change things.
Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, has no positions in the stocks mentioned.
More of What's Trending on TheStreet:
- Car Dealers Will Probably Try to Rip You Off This Labor Day Weekend
- Brick-and-Mortar Stores Like Staples Reign Supreme for Back-to-School Supplies
- Booming Electric Car Sales Might Send This Key Market Soaring 6,100% by 2040
- If You Are Long Oil Companies, You Have to Be Bullish on China
Originally published Aug. 31 at 11:30 a.m. EDT.
Click here for information on RealMoney, where you can see all the blogs, including Jim Cramer's--and reader comments--in real time.
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:
- How things are out of kilter
- How FANG stocks may rise
Action Alerts PLUS, which Jim Cramer co-manages, is long AVGO and NVDA.