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In fact, there's really only one thing that could be wrong with it. EVERYONE AND HIS BROTHER BELIEVES IN IT. It is the most consensus of consensus views.

Sometimes the consensus is dead right: Housing's been going down and everyone knows it's going down, and it keeps going down.

I have said the same thing about Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer's Take) and Wachovia (NYSE: WB) (Cramer's Take) and Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM) (Cramer's Take) and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) (Cramer's Take) -- cut the dividend already! -- and GM (NYSE: GM) (Cramer's Take) -- cut the dividend again already! -- and Ford (NYSE: F) (Cramer's Take). That's been right. That's worked.

So you can't just say the consensus is wrong.

The negativity coming into today's session is as thick as I can recall nearing most short-term bottoms. The issue is there is not enough fear out there. Despite the consensus, which obviously creates a need for lower prices before it is worth buying, there isn't a big spike in the VIX, there isn't a gap down, or a crescendo of selling. There isn't even any volume. So while the bearishness is real thick, the selling isn't. (Bloomberg had an excellent piece on this yesterday, noting how much lower the VIX was than at other bottoms.)

I think we lack a climax because we haven't had a climax, some session where people can say, "I don't care how much lower GM goes, I know it is a buy." Same with Citigroup.

That's because unlike most other times in the stock market, the stocks of big companies that are cascading all need capital, and the companies themselves aren't selling anything off except common.

Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER) (Cramer's Take) should have sold Bloomberg. It is not a core asset. It should have sold its BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) (Cramer's Take) stake. It can make it without it. But no ... nothing.

Citigroup has a lot of core assets, but I now believe that the management of that place is so screwed up it's not redeemable anymore. They just need a 20% Saudi investor. Bank of America will now have to start the process of being the nation's largest mortgage lender in a nation that doesn't have much buying to do. Maybe that will change next year, but by then I suspect the federal government or these state governments will have wiped out Countrywide (NYSE: CFC) (Cramer's Take), which surely would been out of business if BAC had stepped away. The mistakes here have been catastrophic. So what if Wachovia or Washington Mutual have great deposit bases? We know in the end that the FDIC will have to act to protect them and then we will find out what Sheila Bair is made of. I figure she's like everyone else that has surfaced in finance with the feds (except Bob Steel) -- an empty suit.

In the meantime, I cannot disagree with the statement at the top of this piece, except for where it comes to commodity companies that sell into China -- they are the bull market. Anyone who thinks they have to go down too is not in keeping with the way the market works: there's always something that works, it is just the volume of it may be so small that it doesn't matter. That's where we are right now.

All my indicators say that it is extremely dangerous to short here: oscillators, attitudes, polls. They haven't worked either -- or yet. I think the palpable gloom simply does one thing -- it'll be a stair-step down rather than a cascade, where you can make a little money when you are on the stair but then give it back on the next step, until we get to some level that better reflects a GM bankruptcy or a Citigroup collapse, one or the other, or both.

Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.