Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 9/9/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

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Jim Cramer (0:59)

My mission is simple, to make you money. I'm here to level the playing field for all investors. There's always a bull market somewhere, and I promise to help you find it. Mad Money starts now.

Hey, I'm Cramer.

Jim Cramer (1:16)

Welcome to Mad Money. Welcome to Cramer. I know people make friends. I'm just trying to make a little bit of money here, my job. Not just to entertain, but to teach. Don't call me 1-800-743-CNBC. Tweet me at Jim Cramer. Oil controls this entire market. When it goes down, most stocks go up. When it goes up, new stocks can rally. It really is that simple. Right now, with Brent crude slicing through $100 a barrel, only a small group of stocks are going higher. Away from the oil stocks, of course. And the rest are indeed headed lower.

Dow sinking 4.5 points, S&P declining 0.48%, Nasdaq edging down 0.64%.

Before I go into what's wrong here, though, there's suddenly a lot going wrong. Let me just say I am an optimist at heart, and historically that's been the correct stance. When I first walked down the street right out here, Wall Street, 45 years ago, Dow's industrial average stood at 850

Today it's at 52,380.

Long term, it really doesn't pay to be bearish.

At the same time, there are a tremendous number of stocks that have created multiple millionaires, as long as you're willing to stick with them, of course, and that's going to continue the same. So I don't want to give you the sense that I'm turning bearish here. I'm just acknowledging that there's a very real negative, and it is oil. Tomorrow, when we hold our new meeting for the investing club, I'm going to have six ideas that I think make a ton of sense to buy right here, right now. I also want to pitch you on an accidentally high yield, or a stock that's gotten so low that its dividend sports the same 5.3% payout as the 30-year treasury. At the end of the day, my negativity right now revolves around just one thing, but it's a big thing, and it is the price of oil. We've been acting under the illusion that somehow oil was about to go down. We thought there was something going on that would end the war with the rent, even through diplomacy or maybe our bombing campaign doing enough damage to force them to the table.

But we're getting a very different picture now, aren't we? The Iranians seem to almost welcome this war. If anything, they want to poke the bear to demonstrate that their drones give them a level of military equivalence. The result? Oil is going back over $100, and that's not just a magic number that inspires selling. It's a number that's been breached before. Yes, it inspired a wave of selling then, but then the bears were brought to heel because President Trump assured us that peace was at hand. Rather than real peace, though, this was more like the Neville Chamberlain piece in our time. Normally, I wouldn't be too concerned about oil at these levels. The last time we got there was July 23rd. Right before the breach, the president said that oil was going to come down. It stayed up on the 24th. Then Trump paused his airstrikes over the weekend. On the 27th, he said he was having good talks with Iranians. As you know, oil drops 8.7% one day, and we put the triple digits behind us. Or so we thought.

See, this time, it could be different. First, we decided to wage an economic war, something that so far seems futile. Iran is already the most heavily sanctioned country on earth. What else can we do to them economically? Not much. Besides, Iran is not waging an economic war. They are waging an actual war. They didn't close the Strait of Vérmue with sanctions. And as long as the Strait is really impassable, which it is, we've got a serious problem. Second, tomorrow, we learn how much of our Strategic Petroleum Reserve has been released. When the war started, we had 415 million barrels of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That number fell to 286 million at the end of August. 31% decline. I know that still leaves plenty of crew, but I think that we now need to be on some sort of oil watch countdown. Wall Street analysts will soon be telling you what day the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will run out of oil, and it will. The climate gas prices have been steady. Premiums $5.12 on average. Diesel record $5.94. I owe, and that is passed through, believe me. I always tell you that we're a service economy, and the service economy may be about to sputter. The stocks of the retail complex are certainly predicting that exact thing.