Cramer's Morning Take: US Inflation Cools 3/31/23

Jim Cramer (0:01)

Hey, it's Cramer, and this is my morning take on the market from today's CNBC Investing Club Morning Meeting.

Jeff, you know I am not a traditional macro guy, but the macro background today, whether it be the Fed's favorite index, or at least Jay Powell's, the personal consumption expenditures, just fine, not bad, can do the job. Or maybe more important, China. Very, very strong over in China. We have a lot of stocks related to China.

Jeff Marks (0:28)

Yeah, cooler, PCE than expected, showing inflation rising a little bit less than the month before. But yeah, strong numbers overnight out of China, PMIs both on the manufacturing and non-manufacturing side, which is a good sign towards their reopening from the lockdown.

Jim Cramer (0:46)

Carl Quintanilla asked me a question, is there anything you are worried about? Well, of course, there is always things to worry about. But there are these eros that you have, these kind of interregnums in the stock market, where there is no real news, except for benign backdrop like we have right now. So people can extrapolate and basically run and gun anything. And that's exactly what they are doing.

And is it a responsible thing? No, it's just a time-honored thing. I have seen many first quarter where people realize they were caught offside, so they stayed negative and they had to change their view. And that's exactly what happened this week.

Frantically trying to change their view, trying to find things that they can like within their worldview, perhaps a continuation of the banking crisis.

Jeff Marks (1:25)

Sure. And the S&P, it's on track to gain about 6% in the first quarter. Coming into the year, a lot of people were saying, all right, maybe you have a down first half, second half is up. I mean, we still don't know what's going to happen in Q2, but it took a lot of people by surprise.

Jim Cramer (1:40)

Right. I remember I was on vacation during the period, right when we were very worried about Credit Suisse going under, after the three S's are going under, and I got an email from my old friend, Larry Williams, who's a fantastic historian and technician. And he said, I know right now you're thinking about caving, you're thinking about going negative. You got to double down right here. And I wrote back, I said, only a fool would double down. He just called me a foolish. And boom, that's exactly what you had to do. And what I want to remind people is this, okay? We're still lower, okay? If you own Salesforce and you think you've had a good game, you're nowhere.

And yet, Salesforce is going to make the number using Salesforce as kind of an analog for the moment of a profitable growth software company that's going to have a good quarter that is not expensive versus how it's historically been.

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