Tech Bulls Rule in Q1, Inflation Watch, Sen. Elizabeth Warren @ Post 9 3/31/23

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 Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer at post nine of the New York Stock Exchange.

David Faber has the morning off. Wrapping up Q1 today, NASDAQ 100's best March quarter in over a decade. Futures getting a bump here from some lower than expected inflation data, both in Europe and here at home.

Fed bank lending stabilizing as well. A roadmap begins with stocks closing out the month and the quarter. Texan pays for the best quarter since 2020 This key Fed inflation gauge rising less than expected in February. We're going to walk you through PCE and Senator Warren's with us. Joining us live here in just a few moments, we'll talk some banks, crypto and the Fed.

Let's begin though with the markets going into this final trading day of the quarter in the month. I was just thinking about just the journey we've been on in the last 90 days, Jim. We've been all over the map.

Jim Cramer (0:55)

We went from being an economy that was way too hot to being an economy that we thought was in crisis because it's way too cold and deflationary. To back into thinking that perhaps if no more banks are done, that we have to start worrying about inflation again. To where we got some numbers that were a little bit softer, but not so much soft that maybe J-PAL doesn't have to go to work, maybe another hike. But I think this was the quarter that repudiated the yield curve.

Been investing for 40 years, and the periods where the yield curve does matter. And then there's a period where people say the yield curve matters. And what mattered was innovation. What mattered was franchise value.

What mattered were companies that were doing better than we thought, whether it be Salesforce, because the numbers were great, whether it be Meta because they laid people off, whether it be NVIDIA because they've invented something that is unique and different from like the cell phone. We can lose target here. We can lose faith. The economists were of zero help in helping our viewers. They were people like I, John Kenneth Galbraith at college. And he was just a huge gas pack. I mean, I liked it. Don't get me wrong. I mean, it was like one of the finest guys. I had Ken Arrow, Nobel Prize winner. He made you no money whatsoever. And believe me, I was trying to make money. But what's happened is that we have to step back and we have to say, what's our role?

And our role is to try to help people make money. And if you focus on a two-year treasury and you focus on a 10, you focus on the wrong thing. And that's okay.

Look, maybe you were focused on defense. You should have been focused on offense.

Carl Quintanilla (2:25)

That's all I'm saying. You've been obviously critical of the curve, trying to tell people that wasn't an exact historical rhyme. But now that that tell has been discovered, is there a chase? What do you do at 4100?

Jim Cramer (2:38)

Well, at 4100, you begin to realize that the analysts are gonna be driven kicking and screaming into stories that grow, regardless of whether the economy is strong or weak.

Because if we're worried about inflation and deflation, that means they kind of cancel each other out. And what we should be looking for are profitable growth stories. So let's just use Salesforce for a moment.

Mark Benioff, people think he's not tough enough to do the job. He fires a lot of people. He buys back a lot of stock. And the stock, they've got profitable growth and they're gonna be one of the fastest growing enterprise software company ever. And the stock is still not taking out its high.

You look at meta and you say, there's a piece today saying that, well, what you really should be looking at is revenue growth. Well, you know what? You're gonna have revenue growth. So meta is a very inexpensive story. Do you look at Alphabet? I mean, maybe they're being defeated. Very good piece today about how it's not their time because of what Nvidia's doing. It's Microsoft's time. But this is what you go back to.

And it's really, for a lot of people, it's dismay to have to come back and say, oh my God, I gotta come back and look at Apple again. But I don't care whether, baseball season starts. Oh, now I gotta go back and watch baseball again. No, I mean, what matters is what's making people money. And it's terrific that you can make some money in the two year, but nobody watches us to make money in the two year. They watch us to find Nvidia. So why not hunt for the next Nvidia or Nvidia itself?