Cramer: Only bright spot left in the market

Cramer: Only bright spot left in the market

Given Monday's huge market selloff, Jim Cramer knows that it is not easy to spot a bright spot floating around as and opportunity for investors.

"But there were some bright spots-you just had to be willing to look for them, rather than tearing your hair out or curling up in the fetal position on the floor and crying like a baby," the "Mad Money" host said.

Cramer was stunned Monday when he saw the whopper of a pending-home-sales number and learned that the U.S. is officially back to 2006 housing levels. The difference this time is that the loans used to buy these homes are expected to produce very little default, if any. Basically, the people buying homes these days were totally overqualified, even before they get a mortgage.

And the numbers are spectacular. The Northeast region of the U.S. has hit a seasonally adjusted index of 93 now, up from 79 in 2012. The Midwest is up to 111 from 95; the South to 127 from 110; and the West is up to 104 from 103.

Meanwhile, the price of a new home is up year-over-year, about 9 percent. That is a good thing because people don't like to buy homes and lose money on them immediately. They will just stay in their apartments and pay rent if they think they will lose money on day one.

So, how the heck could these numbers be possible while the rest of the economy is so uncertain?





Looking back, the U.S. was a growth nation when it was going into the great recession. Cramer noted there were two components of that: one was the amount of illegal immigrants that were provided with no-document loans in areas like the Inland Empire, Phoenix or the outskirts of Las Vegas.

The second component was the strong birthrates in the country, because booming business meant that people could move out of their parents' houses and start their own families.

But, then the household formation number dropped dramatically to 500,000 from 1 million in the early part of the 2000s, shocking homebuilders. That made people either choose to stay with their parents or rent.

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That is why Cramer was totally shocked when he saw that both KB Home (NYSE: KBH) and Lennar (NYSE: LEN) confirmed that the household formation number jumped to 2 million this year. He now expects homebuilders to get back into the game of constructing new planned developments and create many more jobs.

But the best news out of all of this, for Cramer, is the impact that these numbers will have on companies like Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and Lowe's (NYSE: LOW). Especially considering that the average household still spends below the average of what it once did. When he heard these wonderful housing numbers, he realized this would no longer be the case.

"Housing is now the brightest spot in the U.S. investing universe, and even Greece can't take it away," Cramer said. (Tweet This)

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