Why Cramer thinks Wall Street is actually going higher after the U.S. bombed Iran
Wall Street's positive reaction to Saturday's U.S. bombings in Iran suggests the oil-rich Mideast state is "not as relevant" to the stock market as it used to be, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday. Indeed, U.S. oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate and global standard Brent were modestly lower early Monday, and the S & P 500 pushed higher. Both crude contracts came off their multi-month highs seen overnight following several sessions of volatile trading since Israel first attacked Iran's nuclear facilities on June 13. On Monday afternoon, both WTI and Brent moved further to the downside — off more than 4.5% around 1:30 p.m. ET — after Iran claimed that it struck a U.S. military base in Qatar with missiles. Qatar's military said, however, that its air defense successfully intercepted the missile attack, and no casualties were reported. The market has drifted between green and red for parts of Monday's session, but spiked higher in afternoon trading as oil moved sharply lower. It's a reflection of the dynamic the Club has called out over the past week as the Israel-Iran conflict escalated: Oil prices will heavily influence the stock market in a tense geopolitical moment like this. @CL.1 1D mountain WTI one day trading Oil analyst Helima Croft said in a CNBC interview that energy traders are looking for an off-ramp to the conflict, and some people might view this Iranian attack as being able to say, "OK, we're done for now." In a likely worst-case scenario for the oil market, Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, the only way to ship crude from the oil-rich Persian Gulf to the rest of the globe. Around 20% of global crude consumption flowed through the waterway last year, according to the Energy Information Administration . President Donald Trump said in a social media post Monday that "everyone" should keep oil prices low, and doing otherwise would "play into the hands of the enemy." "I'm just saying to myself, 'Did nothing happen this weekend?' And I think that the answer is, this is not China. This is not rare earth. This is not Taiwan," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street," before the U.S. market officially opened for trading. "It's not strategic. It is tactical, and given that it is tactical, people just say, 'All right. Let's see how that plays out.'" U.S. stocks ultimately opened higher Monday in the first session since the U.S. on Saturday struck three Iranian nuclear sites and entered Israel's war with Iran. "This is not as relevant to our markets as it might have been at one time," Cramer said. The S & P 500 was up more than 0.7% at Monday's highs of the session. .SPX 1D mountain S & P 500 one day trading One of the biggest reasons for the measured reaction, according to Cramer, is that the global energy market looks a lot different now than it did decades ago, thanks to the rise in U.S. oil production. At the moment, it doesn't look like the U.S. will see any substantial oil supply shocks, with Cramer saying there's a belief that the U.S. has "plenty of oil." As investors monitor the Middle East, Cramer pointed to a flurry of positive headlines for individual companies that have lifted their stocks. They included strong earnings Friday from grocery giant Kroger , a report of potential consolidation in the banking sector, and Melius Research's upgrade of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices . "There's nothing which just says, '[Iran] is going to cast a pall on the following companies.' So, I want very much to find out where the Achilles' heel is for the market. But it's not stablecoins. It's not mergers. It's not anything." (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. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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Atlantic
21 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump Wants to ‘Make Iran Great Again'
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Donald Trump raised the idea of toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday, it wasn't just the idea that was surprising. It was the particular phrase he used to describe it. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!' he posted yesterday on Truth Social. The phrase became toxic for a reason. Two years ago, an essay in the Claremont Review of Books noted that regime change entered the popular lexicon in 'the early days of the 9/11 wars, when the Bush (43) Administration argued that the security of America and of the entire world depended not merely on defeating hostile countries militarily but on changing their governments into ones more inherently peaceable and favorable to our interests.' Of course, regimes change all the time, but regime change came to mean 'external, forcible transformation from 'authoritarianism' or 'dictatorship.'' This sounds very much like what Trump is discussing. Having switched from discouraging Israeli military strikes against Iran to joining them, he appears to now be toying with broader ambitions. (Trump offers few endorsements stronger than calling something 'politically incorrect.') But the writer of the Claremont Review essay, a prominent right-wing intellectual, warned about such projects. 'We know how that worked out. Regimes were changed all right, but not into democracies,' he wrote. 'And some of them—e.g., the one in Afghanistan—20 years later changed back to the same regime American firepower had overthrown in 2001.' That writer was Michael Anton. Today he is the director of the policy-planning staff at the State Department (a bit of an oxymoron in this administration), and in April, the White House named him to lead the U.S. delegation at technical talks with Iran on a nuclear deal—negotiations that are presumably irrelevant for the time being. Trump's abrupt shift has thrown the MAGA right into acrimony. In truth, the president has never been a pacificist, as I wrote last week. During the 2016 GOP primary, Trump cannily grasped public anger at the Iraq War and turned it against his rivals. Thinkers such as Anton and politicians such as Vice President J. D. Vance then tried to retrofit a more complete ideology of retrenchment and restraint onto it, but Trump is an improviser, not an ideologue. No one should have been too surprised by the president's order to bomb. Still, his rhetorical embrace of regime change was stunning even to those who never bought into his identity as a dove, and certainly to some of his aides. Perhaps Anton was not surprised to see his view so cavalierly discarded; after all, he once likened backing Trump to playing Russian roulette. But Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were unprepared for the change in rhetoric. Rubio solemnly told Fox Business that the U.S. is not at war with the country it just dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on. Vance, on Meet the Press, insisted, 'Our view has been very clear that we don't want a regime change. We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it's already been built out.' A few hours later, Trump contradicted him directly, in what would have been embarrassing for someone still capable of the emotion. Vance's views on foreign policy are deeply shaped by the Iraq War, in which he served. Now his boss is at risk of speedwalking that conflict one country to the east. The Iraq War was the product of months of preparation by the George W. Bush administration: military mobilization, avid though unsuccessful attempts to rally international support, an extended period of manufacturing consensus in Congress and in the American public. Yet despite that work, and as even proponents of regime change in Iran acknowledge, the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War was a disaster, perhaps the worst American foreign-policy blunder in history. The U.S. government had good war plans for getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime but had not effectively thought through what would happen after that. Trump has done even less of that thinking, and leads a nation far more politically divided and warier of foreign intervention. Americans have long viewed Iran negatively: A Fox News poll before this weekend's airstrikes found that roughly three-quarters of them view Iran as a 'real security threat.' Still, another poll earlier this month found that most don't want the U.S. to get involved in armed conflict there. A Pew Research Center poll in May even found that slightly more Americans think that the United States is its own 'greatest threat' than that Iran is. Trump's flippant transformation of 'Make America great again' into 'Make Iran great again' exemplifies the hubris of the Iraq War project that he had promised to leave behind. Just as U.S. officials claimed that Iraq could be easily and quickly converted into an American-style democracy, Trump wants to export his catchphrase to Iran, where the implementation would be even hazier than it is here. Iran is a country of some 90 million people, not a dollhouse to be rearranged. Can regime change work? The answer depends on how success is defined. In 1973, for example, the U.S. backed a coup in Chile, toppling the leftist leader Salvador Allende. It worked: Allende was killed and replaced by Augusto Pinochet, who created a stable, market-based, U.S.-friendly Chilean government. But doing that involved horrifying repression and the killing and disappearances of thousands of critics, leaving a black mark on the U.S. record. In another case of regime change, the U.S. government helped topple Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. This, too, was an immediate success. Mossadegh was removed, and the Washington-friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to power. But the legacy of the moment stretched on much longer. The shah was also brutally repressive, and Iranians remembered the 1953 coup bitterly. In 1979, a revolution swept Iran, deposing Pahlavi and installing a virulently anti-American government. That regime still rules in Tehran—for now, at least. 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The Hill
27 minutes ago
- The Hill
What the Iran conflict means for gas prices
The Big Story Americans could see modest increases in the prices they pay at the pump in the wake of increasing conflict with Iran, analysts say. © iStock Andrew Lipow, president of consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told The Hill on Monday that any additional increases in gasoline prices will likely be just a few cents. 'I expect that gasoline prices are going to drift up about three to five cents a gallon over the next couple of weeks,' Lipow said. He added that after an initial 5 percent jump in the price of crude oil, 'the market has sold off since then and now has turned negative.' Oil prices fell Monday, and U.S. benchmark WTI crude was down to about $69 per barrel Monday afternoon — after jumping as high as $75 per barrel late last week in anticipation of U.S. strikes on Iran. The U.S. hit Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night, bringing the country directly into Iran's conflict with Israel. Gasoline prices were higher Monday, averaging $3.22 per gallon, up from $3.14 a week ago. Austin Lin, principal analyst for refining and oil products at Wood Mackenzie, told The Hill he believed that fuel prices were higher than they would otherwise be as a result of the conflict, but that he did not believe they would rise much further. 'There's a good argument that says Q3 versus everyone's expectations from a month ago is going to see higher pricing,' Lin said. 'I would temper that and say, I don't think there's probably a lot of uplift from where we currently are.' Read more on the subject at Welcome to The Hill's Energy & Environment newsletter, I'm Rachel Frazin — keeping you up to speed on the policies impacting everything from oil and gas to new supply chains. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here. Essential Reads How policy will affect the energy and environment sectors now and in the future: New York planning first large US nuclear plant in years: Hochul New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) ordered the state's public power utility this week to start working on a zero-emissions advanced nuclear energy site that would be the nation's first major nuclear plant project in nearly two decades. Trump in wake of Iran attack: 'Everyone, keep oil prices down' In the wake of the U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, President Trump on Monday urged 'everyone' to keep oil prices down. Parliamentarian rules against Senate effort to force Postal Service to sell off EVs The Senate parliamentarian says Republicans cannot include a measure that would force the sale of electric vehicles (EVs) used by the U.S. Postal Service in their 'big, beautiful bill.' Green energy credits phaseout divides Senate Republicans How to phase out Biden-era green energy tax credits is emerging as a key flashpoint among Senate Republicans as they seek to advance their version of the 'big, beautiful bill.' What We're Reading News we've flagged from other outlets touching on energy issues, the environment and other topics: There Might Not Be a Map for That: Budget Cuts Threaten Geological Surveys (The New York Times) A potent heat dome is building over the US, sending temperatures into the triple digits (CNN) On Tap Upcoming news themes and events we're watching: What Others are Reading Two key stories on The Hill right now: Supreme Court lifts third country deportation limits; liberals pen scathing dissent The Supreme Court on Monday lifted judge-imposed limits on the Trump administration's deportations to countries where migrants have no ties over a scathing dissent from the court's liberal justices. Read more Former ambassador to Russia: Putin, Xi will celebrate Trump's 'preemptive war' in Iran Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul offered warnings on Saturday of how U.S. strikes on Iran could influence U.S. adversaries around the world. Read more You're all caught up. See you tomorrow! Thank you for signing up! Subscribe to more newsletters here
Bloomberg
33 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Oil Extends Collapse as Trump Announces Ceasefire in the Mideast
Oil extended a collapse as US President Donald Trump announced a tentative ceasefire between Iran and Israel. US marker West Texas Intermediate for August fell as much as 5.1% to $65.02 a barrel in early trading in Asia, after plunging on Monday.
