New Market Week, Musk Interview Announcement, Adobe CEO on AI, Merger Monday 5/15/23

Jim Cramer (0:00)

It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

Carl Quintanilla (0:07)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange.

Future is pretty steady. Active news flow today. Some debt ceiling optimism as talks resume tomorrow.

Softer inflation prints in Europe and Asia, upgrades of Schwab, Metta and DuPont. A roadmap begins with a macro outlook though, investors eyeing new hopes for a DC debt ceiling compromise, and Atlanta Fed President Bosta casting some doubts on rate cuts this year, even if there is a recession.

David Faber (0:36)

Plus, we've got some deals today. Newmont gets that green light for one of the world's largest buyouts so far this year, and One Oak is going to buy Magellan. It's a $19 billion pipeline deal.

Jim will have some things to offer on that.

Jim Cramer (0:48)

Sure.

David Faber (0:48)

As well, we're going to hear about Adobe's push into AI. CEO Shantanu Narayen will join us later in the hour to talk about that.

Carl Quintanilla (0:57)

Let's start with this new market week, including these debt ceiling talks and a bunch of retail earnings. Jim, you've been, I would say, worried about the X date, and I wonder if any of these reports about so-called progress resonate with you.

Jim Cramer (1:10)

I need to hear from the Republicans, particularly from Speaker McCarthy, because Speaker McCarthy is on thin ice if he makes a deal here.

The sitting president who has a recession or inflation has, if it's first term, has historically lost. So I don't understand why Speaker McCarthy would want to come to this deal unless Biden surrendering. If Biden surrendering, I get that. David, if Biden surrendering, this market is going to be up a lot more. This market is not showing me a surrender by Biden. I'm making that point surrender because, remember, whoever can claim that they caused your Social Security check to not go and doesn't have any gravitas, well, the other guy wins. So if Speaker McCarthy says, you know what, you didn't get your Social Security check because of Biden, well, that's who people will believe. They tend to believe that the president has not delivered, not Congress.

So that makes it so Biden would be surrendering. And I don't know if he's going to.

David Faber (2:14)

Remains unclear. I wish we had some level of ability to really understand exactly what's going on, but it's hard to know.

Jim Cramer (2:25)

Well, I mean, I was looking at Mike Wilson, who, look, Mike is, I think he's a force and he's saying, he's talking to a lot of people and he said, meanwhile, there's several clients who are incrementally more worried about a recession this year and other potential risks to growth or market. Such risks include the debt ceiling.

Most of it will believe it won't get resolved, but not without some near term volatility. Well, we haven't had the near term volatility. That I think would be the next few days.

Of course, the president is going away. So if we have near term volatility, then I think people are going to say, we don't have a deal. We'll never get a deal. The next thing you know, we're going to get script if we own 30 day paper.

Carl Quintanilla (3:05)

So you said you are working on a playbook, a default playbook.

Jim Cramer (3:09)

Yes.

Carl Quintanilla (3:10)

Can you share what that might look like?

Jim Cramer (3:12)

Absolutely. We have a very definitive group of stocks that did quite well in 2011

And these were ones that had been going well, then dropped like everything else during the period involving September to October, and then radically recovered. And they almost all look like Biogen, or like Sarepta does this morning.

Literally nothing to do with the economy because people just believe very strongly that the sequestration followed by the debt downgrade would mean that we were having a recession. We did not have a recession, but these stocks performed extraordinarily well. So I'm putting that list together for this evening just because I think people don't understand the depth of really of almost cosmic proportions of how people felt that the sequestration and the debt downgrade would bring. A lot of people are very concerned that there would be no currency, that there would be that if you had six-month paper, you might not get paid. So David, I mean, that was a level of concern. We tend to forget how bad it was, and the sequestration, by the way, was very serious.