Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 10/14/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

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SPEAKER_3 (1:01)

My mission is simple, to make you money.

Jim Cramer (1:05)

I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market summer, and I promise to help you find it.

Hey, I'm Cramer. Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer America. Other people may be friends, I'm just trying to save you some money. My job isn't just to entertain you, but to put this whole thing in some context. So call me 1-800-743-CMBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer. So last night, try to start writing my talk for tomorrow's CBC Investing Club Meeting. Anyone who's a member of the club knows how seriously I am about these meetings. I try to get everything on the table, the good and the bad, including snippets of my current feelings about all the positions we own, the travel trust. In other words, it's a big deal for us and for all club members, especially the ones we answer the questions from. Right now, though, I want to explain how hard it is, how hard it is to run this club in this mean and nasty environment. So, so, so.

So, in the day when the Dow lost 49 points, the SB tumbled 1.1 percent, and the Nasdaq plunged 1.88 percent.

SPEAKER_7 (2:10)

The House of Pain.

Jim Cramer (2:12)

Believe me, it was much worse in the early afternoon. Let me talk about what, why, and what got maybe stymied, and how I ultimately gave up writing after about four hours, and just said, you know what, I better wait until tonight to plan my thoughts. There's too much at stake. There are too many variables. And last night was way too far away from tomorrow for me to speak with any certainty, and I don't like that. Let me tell you what I was up against in trying to make sense of this market last night. First, and this morning, frankly, I knew that I'd have to deal with that consumer price index number that has been blown up by fuel costs and are now infiltrating the entire economy. When people accept a hot CPI reading, showing that it's man-made and could be rolled back instantly if this world of the ran comes to an end, sure enough, at 8.3 this morning, the number comes in and it was a little hotter than expected.

Interest rates immediately flew up, but then oddly, they worked their way down over time, even as the rate of inflation rose 0.6% from August to September. That is incrementally worse. In a tightening atmosphere where the Fed's looking at the impact of its quarter point rate hike so far, we can't tell whether it's really made a difference yet. Maybe you got to do more. Normally, I think that there should have been no recovery in the bonds here. That number was bad. If I had given my talk today at noon, I would have said, you know what, I don't know where rates are going to go up, but they're going to go up plenty.

But they didn't. They went down.

SPEAKER_8 (3:38)

Was it oil? No. No.

Jim Cramer (3:40)

This is still one more day where oil went higher. Was it that the inflation number wasn't as bad as we thought? Impossible. It was a bad number, especially when coupled with the strong possibility of a hot producer price index reading tomorrow, which will restart the debate about how many rate hikes we're going to hear about, might as well tell you about it, for this year or next. This CPI reading says that one hike, not enough. But of course, I haven't seen the PPI yet. Maybe it'll surprise me. There's just no way I can write a speech about the market and our stocks ahead of a PPI number when it might force the Fed to raise rates at its next meeting, which is October 28th. No. You know what I think happened? I think there was a flight to safety going on because we are now beginning to question if all these newer neoclouds, these companies you see all the time on the tape, have enough money to keep building datacenters. Maybe they're going to run out. Rates went down, I think, because some managers are frightened about how poorly the bonds of these neoclouds trade. And I'm talking about the companies that might have started up as Bitcoin managers or just companies that put out a shingle saying, we can build you a datacenter. Now, in some ways, it's even trickier. For example, think about the decision tree here for the Fed. If the Fed raises rates again off some too hot numbers like the CPI we got this morning, that will show how determined Kevin Marsh is, the Fed chief, to stop inflation. But it could also really slow business. That could lower the cost of living, but there's a strong chance it will also throw a bunch of people out of work.