Cramer: Things Are Better
This post from Jim Cramer's blog originally appeared Feb. 3 at 12:21 p.m. ET on RealMoney.
NEW YORK (
) -- Someone had to say it, might as well be me. I am talking about this morning when, after listening to representatives of both parties say things are still way too weak after the bountiful employment number, I just blurted out, "enough already, things are better."
We have learned a lot in the last few years, chief among them that the only really good and trustworthy attitude to have towards the economy is to be gloomy. We know that the moment we aren't gloomy, the moment we present ourselves as outright positive about a hiring number, someone's going to run the tap of your effusiveness next month and you are going to look like a moron.
I want to take that risk. You can only listen to so many CEOs and be on so many conference calls before you realize that companies have stopped laying off and that others are beginning to hire and that still others, like
Home Depot
(HD) - Get Report
and
Halliburton
(HAL) - Get Report
, are hiring like mad. When you are set up to build 13 million cars and it turns out you have to build 14.5 million cars, you need more workers and you aren't going to put them in Mexico given the political instability in the country.
When you haven't built anything of size, whether it be residential apartments or non-residential office buildings, for a half of a decade, there will be pockets of demand. When you find enough oil to reverse a decades-long slide in domestic production, you know you have to hire people to drill it and transport it to pipelines and railroads, which need to be built and trucks, which need to be manufactured and driven.
When Home Depot says it needs more people to meet demand and
Chipotle
(CMG) - Get Report
wants to put up many more stores than in previous years and the big mall and shopping center real estate investment trusts are running near full occupancy, people are going to get hired.
That's where we are right now. It's not gradually getting better, as I thought it was. It's just plain better.
Everyone wants to caveat. Everyone wants to hedge. It's not in the interest of the Republicans to say that there's good hiring going on. That's not how you take back the White House. The president is so worried about seeming callous and not being a cheerleader only to be cut off at the knees when the next number comes out, that he's simply content to send emissaries that say we need the same social programs like unemployment insurance that we needed before. Just yesterday Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that things could be slipping back and there's not much good to report.
I have chastised Bernanke for being too negative. Getting the politicians to bust the gloom seems downright impossible.
Someone has to say, "look things are truly getting better, getting better all of the time and it is going to beget more jobs in retail, in housing in infrastructure in oil and gas."
I guess it might as well be me.
Action Alerts PLUS, which Cramer co-manages as a charitable trust, has no positions in the stocks mentioned.
