Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: Europe Trumps U.S. (Final)


By Scott Rutt 08/16/11 - 07:25 PM EDT

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "It's time to accept the new reality," Jim Cramer said on his "Mad Money" TV show Tuesday.

Cramer said that great news from U.S. is no longer powerful enough to trump news from Europe, but that doesn't mean there aren't opportunities in the market.

Cramer said simply that the U.S. just doesn't matter as much as it used to. In today's case, it was the German industrial production numbers, which came in weaker than expected, that were able to outdo the fairly robust production numbers here at home. That news was also strong enough to outshine the great results posted from Wal-Mart (WMT_) and Home Depot (HD_).

The U.S. may be 310 million people strong, said Cramer, but that's nothing compared to the woes of more than 500 million people in Europe. America may be a great nation, but it no longer has the strong balance sheet that it once had, and its clout in the financial world is waning.

So does that mean that U.S. stocks are totally held captive to Europe's influence on the S&P 500 futures? Cramer said absolutely not. He said that when the news of the day pull down the entire market, investors need to look for opportunities like Perrigo (PRGO_), which traded down eight points in early trading only to rally back nine points by the end of the day.

In addition to Wal-Mart and Home Depot, Cramer said investors can also consider the safety stocks, those that do well in a slowdown, stocks like McDonald's (MCD_) and Abbott Labs (ABT_).

"European production numbers may be more important than our own," admitted Cramer, but that doesn't mean that opportunities in U.S. stocks aren't still out there to be found. "Find the stocks that get brought down but shouldn't be," he said.

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