Friday, March 6, 2009

Buyer's Remorse


From Jim Cramer's open letter to the White House yesterday:

I favored Obama over McCain because I thought Obama to be a middle-of-the-road Democrat, exactly the kind I have supported all my adult life, although I will admit to being far more left-wing during my teenage years and early 20s.

To be totally out of the closet, I actually embrace every part of Obama’s agenda, right down to the increase on personal taxes and the mortgage deduction. I am a fierce environmentalist who has donated multiple acres to the state of New Jersey to keep forever wild. I believe in cap and trade. I favor playing hardball with drug companies that hold up the U.S. government with me-too products.

But these are issues that we have no time for now, on the verge of a second Great Depression. This is an agenda that must be held back for better times. It is an agenda that at this moment is radical vs. what is called for. I am proud to have voted for the Obama who I thought understood the need to get us on the right path, and create jobs and wealth before taxing it and making moves that hurt job creation — certainly ones that will outweigh the meager number of jobs he’s creating.

Most important, I believe his agenda is crushing nest eggs around the nation in loud ways, like the decline in the averages, and in soft but dangerous ways, like in the annuities that can’t be paid and the insurance benefits that will be challenging to deliver on.

So I will fight the fight against that agenda. I will stand up for what I believe and for what I have always believed: Every person has a right to be rich in this country and I want to help them get there. And when they get there, if times are good, we can have them give back or pay higher taxes. Until they get there, I don’t want them shackled or scared or paralyzed. That’s what I see now.


The photo of Jim Cramer accompanied his essay on his Mainstreet.com site.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's hard to believe any entepreneur could ever have supported Comrade Obama.

Anonymous said...

Yipeee Skeee-Daddy! Dow on its way to 15000!!!

I know stocks are overvalued now, but you have to accept that and buy anyway, because they are going higher! Buy anything that hits 80 dollars because once it hits 80 dollars, it will hit 100 dollars, and then 120! I call this my 80 to 100 to 120 rule.

Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!Buy!


A man like me clearly is the epitome of rational thinking.

Anonymous said...

defintion of epitome =

a hairless literary work, right?

Anonymous said...

BooYah! Back to fart on you foolish, factless felines.

epitome –noun
1. a person or thing that is typical of or possesses to a high degree the features of a whole class: He is the epitome of rationality.

Like me!

DaveinHackensack said...

"Yipeee Skeee-Daddy! Dow on its way to 15000!!!"

Here's the real Jim Cramer from the same column I linked to in this post:

"You can argue, of course, that Obama inherited one of the worst hands in the world. I had been a relentless critic of the Bush administration's "stewardship" of the economy, calling repeatedly for changes to avert the disaster that I saw coming, although perhaps [Obama's Press Secretary] Gibbs hasn't seen my CNBC meltdown. Seemed pretty prescient to me.

I, like everyone else, have made less authoritative and wrong statements in the past, but that rant still stands as something that I am sure everyone in the Bush administrations' Treasury and Fed listened to. My calls to sell 20% of your stocks in September at Dow 11,000 and then all of your stock if you need the money for the next five years at Dow 10,000 in October, might have eluded Gibbs, too."

Anonymous said...

Cramer can show quotes for anything that happens.

He predicts early and often and changes opinions like the wind.

Since he predicts everything alternately he can never be right.. or wrong for very long.

Anonymous said...

He can be impotent for long periods though.

DaveinHackensack said...

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

- J.M. Keynes

Anonymous said...

Phil's Stock World
S&P 500? (Points that Is!)

Posted: 09 Mar 2009 03:04 AM PDT

On Mad Money on Friday, Jim Cramer said it - Dow 5,320!

That brings the S&P down to about 550 points, about 20% down from here. Interestingly, Cramer prefaces his comment by saying "is the media too negative" (and here is Jim on the Colbert Report expanding on that) and the funniest, or perhaps most tragic aspect of this is that what he tells his viewers (9 minutes in): "I did an analysis today for TheStreet.com where I factored in every single stock from bottoms up using all bear cases and I came up with 5,320 for the Dow." That is where he left the subject on the TV show. If you do, however, happen to be a (gasp!) reader, the actual article on TheStreet.com says the following:

Keep in mind that this analysis was done with an eye toward the continued wealth destruction, and it is not something that I expect will happen right now, all at once. We are due for the inevitable bounce, and I don’t want to ignore it. And with that note of caution, drum roll please: 5320. I simply can’t get any lower no matter what I do. I just can’t. So with that in mind, you can say that 15%, give or take a few percent, might actually be, are you ready, buyable if we get to 6000. Frankly, after this analysis, I am more sanguine, not less, because of how harsh and disaster-oriented this line-by-line calculation is.

Wow - talk about a mixed message. The omission of that one paragraph from the TV show (and he had 50 minutes left at the time) gave an ENTIRELY different tone to the TV audience than he did to his TheStreet.com readers. I don’t know what Cramer’s motivation is in giving a mixed message, effectively a sell signmal to the TV crowd (which is picked up by most of the media) while telling his subscribers to buy (but only the ones who know what "sanguine" means). This is not a game Jim - people are making life decisions with their 401Ks and there’s a pretty big difference between saying the Dow is heading down 19.7% and I think we’re bottoming out 10% from now and that’s a buying opportunity. Obviously, the benefit to this tactic is, either way, Jim will have something to point to to tell you he was right but how about a little consideration for the audience, who ultimately pay your salary?