JJC:    One year ago today I tried to save western civilization... All right, to be a little less grandiose, I tried to save the American financial system... And the seven million Americans in danger of losing their homes, the ones who had taken out those exotic mortgages... the two and twenty-eights, the teaser eights... from 2005 to 2007... it was a wake up call I was trying to give the federal reserve, and especially its chairman Ben Bernanke... You remember the ran heard 'round the world...

It did garner quite a bit of attention... not only on CNBC and on many trading desks, including my alma mater, but outside of Wall Street... in the real world... which matters much more to me... Look, anyone who was on the set that day with Erin knows I didn't come out and get all hysterical like that... I wasn't looking for attention... I just couldn't take it anymore... I couldn't take the fact that the fed was indeed asleep at the wheel... They were worried about inflation, and they wanted to raise rates... all of those adjustable rate mortgages were starting to reset, causing, well, thousands of foreclosures, the vicious spiraling downward in the housing market... that we've seen wreaking total havoc over all the banks we've seen in the last year... Many of the people I had started out with in the business were now running these big fixed income desks... these bond desks, these mortgages... and they couldn't believe me... they couldn't believe that I wasn't using my bully-pulpit to fiddle about the real thing, but instead come on and talk about stocks, talk about little things... they wanted to know why I wasn't helping?... What was I thinking?... They were bombarding me with calls saying come on Cramer, you know what's going on here... why are you being so complacent, like the fed?... Why aren't you telling it like it is.... we thought you were a straight shooter, but you come out every day as if everything is just hunky dory... I was trying to prevent everything that has happened over the last 12 months... a trillion dollars in losses... $500 billion of them coming from the banks, another $500 billion coming from you... that's how much it looks like it's going to cost to solve the mess... That's how much it looks like it's going to cost the taxpayers now that the government has finally gotten down from its laissez faire high horse and started taking action to fix the situation...

But we wouldn't have needed the bailout... the giant housing bill that Bush signed this week... we wouldn't have needed it if Bernanke had only listened to me... and started slashing the rates drastically... We could have avoided the terrible losses taken by the financials, and even more horrendous declines in their stocks... which are still down enormously after a year ago... even though I think they've bottomed, and are starting to recover... All those jobs a Bear Sterns, the stock, declining 91.5%, from $118 before its emergency takeover by JPMorgan (JPM) to $10 a share... That didn't have to happen... Fannie Mae (FNM) was at $59 bucks a year ago... thanks to Bernanke's inaction, it's at $11.82, down 80%... Freddie Mac (FRE) is down 86% since my plea for help... Merrill Lynch (MER) is down 63.2%... WM is down 85.8%... Lehman Brothers (LEH) is down 69.3% since my so called rant... Citigroup (C) is down 59.7%... Wachovia Corp. (WB) is down 59.5%... and let's not forget Indy Mac, which was at $20.16 a year ago... and has since been seized by the FDIC...

That's what I saw coming a year ago when I begged pleaded and screamed for the fed to cut rates... something that I believe would have averted most, if not all of the damage... And while I hate to say I told you so in a situation where so many people have lost their homes, their jobs their money... it is now undeniable that my rant, which seemed hysterical at the time, hey, Cramer's off his meds, he lost it, blah, blah, blah, turned out to be clear of the wind...

All Bernanke had to do to avert this mess was to cut short rates drastically... cut them fast, cut them low enough that people with adjustable mortgages would have a chance to refinance... and the banks would have a chance to make some money off of their deposits to offset the losses they were going to take... The discount rate that which banks can borrow from the fed was at 6 and a quarter% a year... the fed didn't start cutting it until August 17th... but they used a series of wee little cuts that weren't enough to stop the crisis... and part because of guys like then federal reserve president, Bill Poole, who thought they should be raising rates... raising rates... can you imagine?... can you picture what would have happened if we listened to Poole?... How out of touch, how complacent... what a rube... Poole would have put us all on bread lines for heavens sake... A year ago the federal funds rate, the rate that banks can use to borrow from each other, was at 5 and a quarter%... and Bernanke didn't start cutting that until September 18th... once again with little cuts that were too little too late... They brought the fed funds rate down to 2% on April 30th... but we needed Bernanke to slash rates down to 2% with a series of big cuts within a few weeks... okay, maybe a couple months of my rant...

That's what I was pleading for... I was pleading for quick, big cuts... not the slow salami slicing that we got... In truth, everyone on a major mortgage back or bond desk or in fixed income knew that we were staring Armageddon in the face... Everyone knew it... I couldn't go to a cocktail party, I couldn't sit on the sidelines at my kids' games without hearing about this... When people, my friends who worked with me in the business for years and years and years... so how the heck could the fed not see this or thought it was coming... why did they need a guy on tv to tell them?... How on earth could they have been so irresponsible?... and how could they get away with it?... NFL coaches are held to a higher standard than these guys... I want to know why congress isn't investigating why Bernanke was so in favor of all these junk mortgages and believe in them... why were they thinking about raising rates?...

I don't understand how we can treat the federal reserve as some kind of sacred institution... and act like Bernanke is the guy with all the answers... When he really was the guy with all the textbooks, head buried in the sand... totally ignorant of the crisis that was coming, and that only he had the power to avert... How could a lunatic television show host, like me, who uses hokey sound effects and animal noises have gotten this right?... and the revere of Ben Bernanke had been so wrong... Well it's simple isn't it?... No one holds the federal reserve accountable... I think we should have started holding the feds collective feet to the fire ages ago... and we better start doing it sometime soon...