“Bernanke’s the best central banker we could ever ask for,” Cramer said of the Federal Reserve chairman during Monday’s Mad Money.
Uncle Ben, as Cramer affectionately calls him, may have been slow to act as the credit crisis unfolded, but he’s since steered the ship back on course, leading us toward a full-fledged recovery.
Of course, Bernanke never gets his due. Just last week, the bears were predicting he’d flub today’s lunchtime speech and send the markets plummeting lower. The chattering classes said he’d worry publicly about bubbles caused by low interest rates or the dollar’s weakness. They also expected he might announce a turn in the economy and a necessary change in monetary policy, which would hurt the stock market.
But none of that happened.
Instead, Bernanke declared that the economy isn’t strong enough to raise rates, Cramer said, and inflationary bubbles like commercial and residential real estate don’t exist right now. The Fed chief knows we need job creation. He knows that boosting rates could push us back into a recession. He knows that China is driving the world economy, not the US. And this much-needed awareness is allowing us to recover.
“He’s giving us a chance to actually get back to even,” Cramer said.
This means that investors can buy “pretty much anything,” Cramer said. The transports hit a new high, which indicates an economic rebound. But at the same time the so-called recession stocks – Procter & Gamble , McDonald’s , Merck and Kimberly-Clark – today made the new-high list, as did many of the techs. The oils rallied, too, and the banks showed signs of life. That marks the return of Cramer’s leadership trinity: banks, oils and tech.
What else is working? Recovery names like Caterpillar , 3M , Emerson Electric , Union Pacific and Visa . And dividend plays Altria , Con Ed , Bristol-Myers Squibb , Kinder Morgan Energy Partners and ConocoPhillips , which allow investors to rebuild their savings quicker than low-interest bank accounts.
The bottom line, though, is that from now on when Bernanke gives a speech, you want to buy stocks ahead of it.
“As you sure should have last Friday,” Cramer said, “and as you most likely will in the future.”
Cramer’s charitable trust owns Altria, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Emerson Electric and Procter & Gamble.
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