[The Street] Jim Cramer's Best Blogs

Jim Cramer fills his blog on RealMoney every day with his up-to-the-minute reactions to what's happening in the market and his legendary ahead-of-the-crowd ideas. This week he blogged on:

• Europe's manic-depressive effect on the market;
• why Starbuck's excellent performance this quarter is emblematic of many companies; and
• why Groupon's IPO appears to be an unsavory reminder of another era.

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Reduction in Sovereign Bond Exposure

Posted at 10:42 a.m. EDT on Friday, Nov. 4.

I don't know about you, but these guys in Europe are driving me crazy. As the government leaders dither, and Italian bond yields go higher, it's almost as if they are saying, "Look, we have a plan, but we forgot that we have to fund it." There's not enough money to do the job.

Because of this, we're not even focused on the fairly decent jobs revisions to a previous month, even as this month's numbers seem tepid. Now we know why retail was so much stronger than we thought this summer; so was employment.

So we get hit.I do want to point out though that those who are on apocalypse watch must take into account that as we get European bank earnings reports, we see that sovereign bond exposure is being cut rather dramatically. We have ING(ING), The Royal Bank of Scotland(RBS) and BNP Paribas reducing their holdings with alacrity. Greece is almost a nonevent. Italy might not be as catastrophic as the bears say.

This reduction matters so much because the reverberations from the sovereign debt worries could create the Lehman situation that we are all so scared of. There are still some banks that we think have big exposure, but we have to be encouraged about ! how MF G lobal may have been buying, but the large European banks are selling!