What to do while waiting for stock market-minded Trump to say enough is enough

Published Sun, Mar 9 20258:09 PM EDT

Our president, Donald Trump , tells us that "what we are doing is big," so there might be economic consequences to come that we don't like. But he can't change the plan, whatever the heck the plan is. Our Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, comes on CNBC and tells us that the economy has to detox from public spending. It's been detoxed. There's no new money coming from Washington, and we don't expect it. We are waiting for the clawbacks — both legal and illegal — to begin. Our Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, tells us to worry about tariffs, then not to worry, and then to worry again. What was the last worry or not worry turn? I forget. Is he freelancing? It's enough to make you dizzy as if the whole point of the exercise, post-inauguration is to get you to sell all of the stocks you own and certainly not to put any money to work. Believe me, I could tell you it doesn't matter, we're doing fine. The major stock benchmarks are barely down. But one look at this endless rotation out of anything with earnings risk relative to the economy, or anything with exposure to data centers, personal computers, semiconductors, and enterprise software tells you that about 50% of the market is now radioactive. The only buyers I can see are those banking on a recession and think they can squeeze their whole portfolios into Johnson & Johnson , Amgen , Abbvie — and, thank heavens, Club name Abbott Laboratories . Oh, and high-yielding oils. Good luck with the latter when crude hits $60 per barrel because we're trying to stabilize the situation in Ukraine, which would allow Russia to sell more oil if it wanted or needed to. It was about to be stabilized the other way, with a Ukrainian victory and a Russian defeat there and in the Middle East. Now, we are going to have a new kind of stability, one that we didn't see coming. I can state that if this stock rotation is about out of everything and into a handful of stocks, I do want to bet against it with everything I have, except I know to do anything at once is to court disaster in this tape emanating from the White House. It's not worth it even if you agree in principle with what Trump is trying to accomplish. What's behind so much of what I sense is the weariness that so many feel. I think that, first, there is an unreality about this moment that most are afraid to speak about because we fear repercussions. I don't fret about or hate everything I am seeing or hearing. I want a smaller government. I want waste cut. But I don't think everyone who works for the federal government is a doofus and must be broomed pronto. I just want it to shrink the way Ronald Reagan did it — a little gentility would go a long way at this moment. The weariness and the wariness, for that matter, tend to be spawned by the hard-to-fathom doublespeak and the inability of anyone with gravitas in Washington to say something that counters the new wisdom. It's hard to fathom. Did Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky start the war against Russia? Really? Did I miss the unleashing of his myriad divisions toward Moscow? Was there some sort of Napoleonic moment by this poorly dressed man? Are there really any minerals to speak of in Ukraine that could or have made a difference historically? It's been a bread basket, but special minerals, rare metals? I think they would have been in play, or at least talked about, before Trump recaptured the White House if they mattered. Can tariffs pay for a budget deficit when Social Security, Medicare and the interest payments on our debt are what really matter and there's $36 trillion of national debt to be made up by them? I salute the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a White House advisory group, cutting payrolls, and I like that Elon Musk is approaching it somewhat systematically except when it comes to historic leftwing bastions where a blowtorch suddenly appears to give new meaning to the word crisp. Tariffs and DOGE can't pay for any one of those troika of budget horrors even as we hear constantly that they can. Tariffs are good for the economy? Sure, when you are Alexander Hamilton and we are trying to have a manufacturing base. But when you have 4% unemployment, as we have in the U.S., and we can't find people to work in manufacturing jobs, I am not sure how good they are. Just target those countries where they're dumping on us or have high tariffs on our goods. That I like. Take the history books we studied that proved over and over again that tariffs helped cause the Great Depression. They were not lies. They were not propaganda. They were just empirical observations. Oh, and, Canada is not part of the fentanyl problem so can we drop that Orwellian cynicism, please? It's issues like these, ones where the conclusions smack more of fantasy than of fact, that try our intelligence and make us angry even if we like that waste is being rooted out and Mexico helping us on the border and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Softbank and Club name Apple are going to build things here even if we won't find enough workers to do so. We all sense that our trading partners have had their way with us for too long. We just want things to be done systematically and in a consistent way even if we don't like them. Right now, however, we hold this truth to be self-evident: there's not a lot of truth being told when it comes to foreign policy or economic growth right now. We have studied too many regimes that have not emphasized the truth to their people and those regimes don't have a strong place in the history books, again even if you believe in the policies themselves. Exaggeration does not count as truth. So, what makes it all end? Our capitulation as shareholders? That's not going to happen. A comprehensive settlement involving tariffs in Europe and Asia before our tariffs are announced? That's not going to happen. A sharp decline from here for the markets because everyone, the left and the right, are fed up with the inconsistencies > Maybe. Here's what's a shame. If the president were not arbitrary and capricious and judgmental to a fault, if he just laid out, "Here's the tariff plan per each country and here's what it is going to take to make up the difference" the stock market — ex-the data center, which is a different story — would probably already be rising. It could be rallying on more consumer confidence that would increase spending. Right now, it looks pretty bleak on that front. Or it could do so because we are most likely going to get a series of weaker reads on the economy, at least that what all the individual earnings tell us and the Federal Reserve will commit to cutting interest rates. When Burlington Stores is your strongest earnings surprise of the quarter — I don't have anything against off-price retailer, in fact, the Club owns and loves TJX Companies — you are not in a position to buy stocks until they come down even further unless you knew that there could be some calvary somewhere that could ride to the rescue. Pass me the binoculars; I don't see one yet because the dust storm the Whie House keeps kicking up is obscuring everything. As far as tech, I think that we have gone from loving artificial intelligence and its accoutrements too much to hating them way more than they should be hated; the nadir being the shellacking Friday that MongoDB , Club name CrowdStrike , and Dell received for not blowing out the estimates. Do you know all three would have been flat to up, not still cascading, in another tape. I get that the data center business could slow. Anything can slow. But it hasn't. It's actually gotten more robust of late although you don't hear many others saying that. I get that there could be fewer users of Club name Nvidia 's most expensive chips, except there are more — a whole new group of hyperscaler clients. I understand that Broadcom , our other portfolio chipmaker, could be losing its strength except for it just reported this past Thursday, and it is gaining strength. The only certainty is there will be tremendous uncertainty, hence few mergers and no initial public offerings to think of, which is incredible given that under Trump it was supposed to be the opposite. That is not so hot for Club holding Goldman Sachs , which is looking not so hot at this moment. But it won't stay that way. Can't stay that way. There's too much cash around and too many companies that want to do something to grow, something that would have been shot down these last four years under former President Joe Biden . But I have been working on a thesis that I intend to roll out at the next Investing Club Monthly Meeting. It's what happens if everything you thought good would happen for the stock market under Trump hasn't happened, and everything you knew would be horrendous for the stock market has happened times ten. Do you think that's sustainable? Do you think it's going or be a nonstop horror show out of Washington? I can't imagine that can be the case. It's not Trump's disposition. He's no happy warrior, but he is also not someone who breaks a lot of eggs and yet makes no omelets. We're getting close to where I have to believe the president recognizes that it is not enough to say no gain without pain, even as he just finally copped to it. I think he's going to try to figure out something good for the markets and not when the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 10% from here. I think he cares more that our markets will soon be the worst in the world and no one with pride can ignore that. He can't be insensitive to our endless declines versus their endless advances. That's not like him. Unfortunately, it's impossible to think what's going to turn things around in either the tech or the tariff world. I am hoping that Nvidia's GTC conference next week — call it AI Woodstock — won't turn into AI Hemlock. I wish the S & P 500 Short Range Oscillator , stuck just shy of oversold, could be split into the part that feels like its minus 13.49% and the part that is so overbought, like the drugs, that it is ridiculous. We've seen these kinds of bifurcations before and they can't be cured by ignoring them. So we wait. For the Club, we have switched entirely to the buy side except to sell some of our now incredibly overbought drug stocks. I can't tolerate parabolic moves and I always sell them, sometimes too quickly, but almost never too late, and when I don't sell a whole position into a parabola, like the one we had in Starbucks , I almost always regret it. I see so many broken charts that I know once they are all broken that's the end because they don't break twice. They mend. That's where we are now. We have almost given up on expecting anything we expected from this White House or from Wall Street. That means we are close to giving up on everything. When everyone expects every utterance from Trump is bad for the market, then we have a form of consistency in its own right where those hanging on for dear life will have all let go. That means don't close your eyes. Just keep looking. Maybe the cavalry is on the horizon, it's just the rhetorical smoke that's blocking it. That will lift. Selling now seems a little reckless unless you want to take the sell side to the ridiculous buy program that roils us each day. Of that I cant blame you; as I said we are doing it. Just remember to buy something back when we get the air pocket that happens at the end of every rotation. It will end soon enough. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. 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President-elect Donald Trump speaks with CNBC's Jim Cramer at the NYSE on Dec. 12th, 2024.

CNBC

Our president, Donald Trump, tells us that "what we are doing is big," so there might be economic consequences to come that we don't like. But he can't change the plan, whatever the heck the plan is.