[Beginning of Cramer's verbatim comments for this segment...]

Jim:           Does American jobless trump everything… I know that 9.5% unemployment is awful… but does it trump say Apple’s iPhone sales… does it cancel out the explosive demand for 3G and 4G wireless gadgets… and worldwide mobile internet plays…like Qualcomm or Palm… how about the veracious Chinese demand for copper or steel… are they nullified by our unemployment figures… does the lack of jobs here somehow cancel those orders from Communist China… how about the fantastic numbers from General Mills… or how about how terrific the business is at the Yum! Brands… Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silvers for all you home gamers and seafood lovers… both companies are doing incredibly well… is that somehow neutralized because unemployment is still a big issue.

Should we simply ignore these bountiful earnings… sell everything… and honker down… because of that big, bad figure from last Thursday… or maybe, just maybe, does it make sense to focus on how the food and staple stocks are gaining… thanks to the collapsing grain, natural gas, gasoline… and how Yum! is kicking butt with lower raw costs for chicken, and a weaker dollar… plus a big expansion into Russia and China… where there is a long march away from General Tso and towards Colonel Sanders...

Do you really think that China, Russia , Brazil are they marching to the tune of the numbers of our labor department… pending new home sales, they are soaring… doesn’t matter, unemployment… big order pickup in autos… doesn’t matter, unemployment… 8 million build up of cars going to 10 million… who cares, unemployment… they are all rendered null and void… totally trumped and pantsed by unemployment… makes no sense to me… but that is the question that you have to ask yourselves with this market… does an ugly job situation counter balance or even outweigh everything… everything that is good.

That is what the people selling early in the day seem to believe after the big sell off on Thursday… but I think that they are wrong… and judging by today’s positive close after spending most of the time in the red… the market seems to agree with me… before you sell stocks aggressively off of a particular monthly labor report there is something that you need to ask yourself… do 40,000, 60,000, maybe even 63,000 lost jobs really offset everything good that has happened around the world in the last 3 months… including a peak in gasoline prices… how about a crash in natural gas… 63% of our homes are heated by natural gas.

Remember when $3 gasoline was the big fear… I had to talk about that on the “Today Show” when I said that it was not going to happen…like I will ever get credit for that one… anyway, consider this gasoline is now headed to $2.30... positive… I think so… how about all of the disposable income that we could generate… as we saw last fall as gas fell and restaurant stocks soared… which is why I spent so much time on Yum!… you have to ask yourself if you should be selling now that mortgage rates have stopped going higher… but are starting to actually tick down.

How about affordability… it has gotten better thanks to lower housing prices… to me that says buy… those concerns were all supposed to derail the economy… remember… let me ask you something… is the economy now going to re-rail… or perhaps it never left the tracks… you have got to ask yourself if the government were to take 100,000 of those unemployed people… give them jobs taking care of federal lands and parks… working at the post office… having them go into a modern day civilian conservation court… or a works progress administration… what would you think about the market then… wouldn’t you believe that it would head much higher.

In other words… if we got a non-Nancy Pelosi stimulus… one that created real jobs and didn’t just give existing federal, state and local employees higher wages and more job security… to me that is the cheap claim of the Pelosi stimulus… would we still be fretting… I point this out because if you let one piece of data, even as I submit that it is the most significant piece, overwhelm all the other evidence of a world wide recovery… albeit a slow one… then you made a big mistake… and today you got burned for it… as the market recovered nicely… in part, I am sure that you heard this all day, a German interview with a Federal Express executive… who said that things are better.

You know the Dow closed up a cool 44 points… that is 119 points than this mornings low… that was a time to buy not to sell… because people were taking a little bigger perspective… you cannot allow one piece of the puzzle… even the biggest piece… to convince you that it is next stop Dow 6300... as so many of the sellers did this morning… and as many of the sellers did on Thursday.

Frankly, we have become so binary that it is ridiculous… so as a counterweight to that let me tell you what I see happening… when I take all of the data into account… we are going to have a slow recovery… one that does not produce a lot of jobs… or a lot of spending… but should produce some decent profits because of the massive layoffs and the shutting of facilities… enough profits to own United Parcel or United Technologies… but not enough to own United Airlines… that may not be a recipe for Dow 10,000 but it sure isn’t a Donner party cookbook for Dow 6300 either.

So where do I see stocks going… I think we are home on the range… low end, Dow 7,000... a high 7,000... high end, high 8,000’s… no lower because even without job growth we have taken the catastrophe of the great Depression II off of the table thanks to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his heroic effort to pump money into the system… no higher though than the upper 8,000’s… because one we get a second stimulus, which we absolutely need… then neither the market nor the economy will be able to catch fire… instead they will just smolder along happy that the commodity prices are down… and continue with the gigantic reliance on the strength of the capitalist roding, decent cracking down Communists in China… and while I am at it, those guys in China, they are anti 1st Amendment… to say nothing of the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, or the 8th… something that I totally identify with… although I am not sure that many of you agree with me.

Given the situation… I think that it is easy to be bullish on the way down for defensives and high yielders like the Cokes or the Lilly’s… not to mention the accidental high yielders like Federal Reality, Nordic American Tanker… yes I still like it… and Illinois Tool Works… I think that the smart play is to buy these stocks when the US-centric investors sell… like they did this morning… and like they did on Thursday.

Here is the bottom line…

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The Bottom Line!:     The real take away… there is no single one piece of data that is going to determine the markets performance… there are many different important pieces of data beyond just US joblessness… and we are just not that important anymore… which is why you need a diversified portfolio of stocks that do not go down all at once… with some that benefit if the recession lingers and unemployment doesn’t abate… where the bull market is… and some that could soar if the recovery ever kicks into high gear.


The unemployment is just one piece of the puzzle… those who sold all the way down on Thursday… those who sold at the opening… nah, nah, nah, nah… and someone complained this weekend about the vaudeville nature of the show… oooohhhh.

[verbatim recap]

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