Jim Cramer has made news in the past few days for assailing Obama's efforts to fix the financial crisis. Obama's budget, says Cramer, “basically put a level of fear in this country that I have not seen ever in my life.” "Shareholder friendly? This is the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president,” he added. This piqued the memory of a smart reader who e-mailed this bit of Cramer-wisdom from June 2007:
Buy Bear Stearns despite all the toxic hedge fund handwringing, Jim Cramer said Friday on CNBC's "Stop Trading!" segment.Cramer said 1998's collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund "was 100 times worse" than the apparent demise of two highly leveraged Bear Stearns funds that were betting on subprime mortgages. Cramer said the near implosion of the funds "is a liquidity issue, not a credit issue," and that big Wall Street buyers of the fund's paper, such as Barclays, "need to grow up."Cramer said there will be another toxic fund out there somewhere that will blow up, but that's just "another group of idiots" and investors should keep "a cooler head" before they go out and sell all their brokerage stocks on the news."Sell them for another reason" if you must, Cramer said. But he urged investors to bear in mind the overall strength of recent quarters at Goldman, Lehman and Morgan Stanley.
