Cramer Predicts Wages to Rise
Today, Jim Cramer said (subscription required) that the end of the American Axle strike will allow a lot of GM workers to go back to work:
“Don’t overlook this strike’s impact. It hurt everything from wages to raw materials. Those will snap back quickly now and make the recession scenario that much tougher to propound.”
I will keep this in mind while watching the withholding data, but I am skeptical of Cramer’s theory. Just today, Bloomberg published this story that mentioned falling auto sales:
“Auto sales in April slid to a 14.4 million annual rate, the lowest since 1998…”
Maybe Americans have been breathlessly waiting for GM to start building cars again, and this whole recession thingy was just the result of some stubborn auto workers. But I’m thinking this is just another example of a perma-bull grasping at straws and wishing that the recession wasn’t real.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Cramer is an asswipe. Told people to buy Bear Stearns and a few days later that crap bank went belly-up. Then he answered a guy on the phone he meant the preferred shares. Phone call was even a fake. What an idiot!
May 19th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
I think Cramer got a bit of a bum rap on Bear Stearns. The first caller asked him if he should pull his money out of Bear Stearns, and Cramer said “No”, your money is safe. It wasn’t crystal clear, but they were talking about the caller’s money in his brokerage account at Bear Stearns, not if the stock was a buy or a sell. And as far as I know, nobody who had an account at Bear lost any money.
One thing we have learned about bankers is that they can lie as well as anybody else. Nobody outside of Bear could have really known what was going on inside. This is why I prefer ETFs to individual stocks. How could I ever know what was *really* going inside a company? Only the insiders ever know for sure, and they often don’t tell the truth.