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Cramer's Second Victory: How an insurance bailout spiked today's Dow

I was surprised and pleased to see the Dow rebound this afternoon. The reason the market rebounded is simple: the New York Insurance regulatory agency met with bond insurers to discuss ways to bail them out of the little mess they're in. Count this as another victory for Jim Cramer.

Just yesterday, Cramer was making his pitch for catastrophe unless somebody saved the bond insurers who were losing their AAA rating and thus being driven out of business. Without bond insurers, all those $3.7 trillion worth of corporate bonds -- and plenty of other municipal and state bonds too -- had nobody to back them up in case the bond issuers defaulted. In Cramer's view, this was spooking the market.

But this afternoon, just as it did last August when Cramer issued the whine heard round the financial world, the government gave Cramer what he wanted. But we didn't get a complete repeat of last August -- when the Fed cut interest rates for Cramer. Today, Bloomberg News reported that the New York Insurance Department is meeting with bond insurers. This includes one of the biggest, MBIA Inc. (NYSE: MBI), which insures $2.4 trillion worth of bonds. It is likely they'll be bailed out. And the market ended up rising about 300 points.

Unfortunately, the market benefit of those government bailouts only last a day or two. What will Cramer whine for next?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in MBIA securities.

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA-89.2312,801.23
NASDAQ-23.352,903.88
S&P 500-9.311,342.64

Last updated: February 11, 2012: 05:15 PM

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