You just feel like telling President Obama, "Look, stay focused on getting us out of this severe recession in a responsible way without too much budget busting and things will all come together."
Instead, you wake up, and every day's historic ... including a lot of days you don't want to be historic. Or sweeping. Or groundbreaking. Like this one.
The only thing we really want to hear is that the U.S. growth rate is going from negative to positive, or even less negative. Now in our faces is the World Bank news from China that growth there is being raised from 6.5% to 7.2%. From the Chinese I can take all sorts of sweeping and groundbreaking and even, yes, revolutionary.
Instead, we will probably have another down day filled with dread from Washington. Oh, and would it be so troubling not to hear from Washington at all for a couple of days?
There isn't anything on the surface from the new "overhaul" of financial services that strikes me as too outrageous given how out of control our financial markets have been. You have to put up more capital to do crazy things. They don't want to strangle innovation, even though I think it should be strangled because it has created no wealth whatsoever. They want shareholders to have more say, but that's not possible because the big shareholders could care less. They want banks to lend responsibly and less rapaciously ... good luck with that. They want hedge funds to tell us who they are. Reasonable.
Of course, all of these entities are rich and they will spend a ton of money to be sure none of this happens.
In fact, the only thing I am worried about is that the one agency that doesn't have the lobbying effort will actually see its power curtailed, and that's the Fed, as per Ron Insana's fantastic piece yesterday in these cyberpages.
I think the contrast between the "less bad ... perhaps" camp of earnings unenthusiasts and the endless "we're fine, let's go legislate" urgency of the president -- combined with an obviously ignorant Europe that thinks the issue is "too much stimulus" -- is causing this ugliness, including the worst stretch of stock market woe over there since January.
Perhaps it is too glib to look out the window (another nasty day of bad weather in the New York region) and say, "Here we go, bad one coming, aided and abetted by endless groundbreaking in Washington," but it seems like it is going to be another bad one coming, aided and abetted by endless groundbreaking in Washington. Does anyone mind if we all collectively go back to sleep and hope that tomorrow Obama's more tired and we can just focus on something less revolutionary, like creating jobs?
Is that all that unreasonable?
Random musings: We are in a week defined by Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) (Cramer's Take) and FedEx (NYSE: FDX) (Cramer's Take), which means we are in a week defined by "we've moved up too far if it is all just cost-cutting."
Jim Cramer is co-founder and chairman 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.











Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-18-2009 @ 8:20PM
The Citizen said...
We are going to be in this financial funk for a while, stick with consumer staples.