JJC:    Yeah, that's right... nice rally today... at last...

You probably saw what it was triggered by... It was triggered by Merrill Lynch (MER)... How can MER rally when it did one of the biggest stock offerings I've ever seen today?... How could you make almost $4 bucks on the 380 million shares of stock offered by a company which has lost 50% of its value this year alone?... How is that possible?... Stunning... How could it spark a rally, and not a decline?... Wasn't it supposed to go down today?... How did we get the market up 266 points?...

Simple...

Because, the market's found a bottom... Or, at least, the part of the market that has been the worst... All these dead obligations that you've heard so much about... I'm not going to give you the Wall Street jibberish... But let's just say we found a price for them... Let's go over the pieces of the puzzle... First, the bank piece... Merrill didn't just raise a ton of capital, $8.5 billion to be exact, it gave us a bottom in the financials toxic waste that has seemed everywhere into our system all over the world, whether it be Iceland, Norway, Australia, Africa, China... We don't know what to do with it... Until today, and I say, Hallelujah... All these bad bonds, the CDO's the nonsense made up of crummy mortgages, typically written, many fraudulently from 2005-2007... Tons of them, tons of them sponsored by Merrill Lynch... Well, we finally found a price that they can be sold at... So what if it turns out to be a fifth of what we thought they were or half of what we thought they were just a few weeks ago... At least they can be sold...

For one year, for one year, ever since I told you, they know nothing, we have waited to see if anyone would be tempted to buy this stuff in bulk or someone would be bold enough to sell it at a gigantic loss... Today we got both... Alpha called LS, we're familiar with them because they bought LEND last year... They're the buyer, MER is the seller... And the market cheered... It cheered because at last we know where the bottom in this stock is and if we know where the bottom in this stuff is, well then we know where C has to do to get out of this mess... Now we know what Bob Steel, the CEO can do at WB... We even know, fingers crossed, what Washington Mutual can do to save itself... When you combine all of those weaker banks with the fortress banks, you remember Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC), JPMorgan (JPM), US Bancorp (USB)... When you combine the news about the bad, with the good, and they were all screaming today, the fortress banks are huge... And I got to tell you, I sat here and I said no pain, no game, no guts, no glory, should I just call a bottom?...

Should I just call a bottom?...

Well how about this?... I can articulate the case for a bottom... I can articulate a case for why we can maybe finally, do this... Well, it wasn't just the financials... How could we rally away from the financials?... Because, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, two companies, two diverse companies, Colgate-Palmolive Co. (CL), which you're supposed to buy when we're going into a recession, and Cramer-fave, United States Steel Corp. (X), which you're supposed to sell going in to a recession, both reported remarkably great earnings... I mean, real fabulous...

We knew steel right?... Because we knew John Surma when we met him when we went to Penn State... These were unbelievable quarters...

Colgate tacked on five points, and letter X, jumped 20 points...

You don't get both of these things happening in a really bad market... I have to tell you the truth, you don't see them happen in a bear market, no, I don't think so... To me, it's a sign that the market wants to rally, and rally hard... And finally, let's get the third piece of the puzzle, the saga of lower oil continues with oil down almost three dollars... Now, you know what we've been saying on Mad Money... No not happy days are here again, but happier days are here, courtesy of the total and utter collapse of oil as well as other commodities... Now, you know this is going to lead to a dramatic decline at the pump... The smackdown in oil, which is in a bear market, and you know I think will continue right down to $110, $148 to $110, should put us at $3.50 at the pump by labor day... No wonder retail stocks also rallied on the news...

In short, once again, what happened?...

We got too gloomy, we got too gloomy with those two big sell offs... So gloomy, that had we decided that financials would be the end of us, all of us would have missed a magnificent rally... Again, exhibit A, about why I say you've got to stay in the game... Those who got out yesterday, those who couldn't take the pain, how are they doing?... Now, I will go out on a limb, and say that this rally isn't over... And, if we get a decent employment number, you know the federal government reports, the labor department reports employment numbers on Friday, where lay offs don't accelerate, this won't be the end, it will just be the beginning and those people who left the table because they couldn't take the pain are going to miss the game... All right, now that's the good news, it's good news about Merrill... And we're thrilled... We are thrilled for those people who bought shares in the deal, thrilled that the company got rid of the real bad stuff that had been dogging this terrific franchise...

Thrilled that Merrill's name is still intact... But that doesn't mean we don't have some work to do right now, right here on our Wall of Shame...

Now, while it is great to watch the stock pop almost four points off the secondary, the first banking secondary that seemed to have made you a lot of money, Citigroup (C) was up and then went right back down...

I cannot let John Thain, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, off the hook here... John's made so many promises, done so many things that are rosy that Merrill didn't need capital... How many times did he say that?... That he was conservatively valuing what was on the table, how many times did he say this?... That despite today's lucky offering, I have to say, John's been less than straight with us... This isn't the first time either... Much of my conviction on my worst stock picks since I began Mad Money, yeah you know what that is, the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Euronext, Inc. (NYX), rested on positive assertions that John Thain said would happen, that didn't and from his insistence to me personally that the market share loss I was worried about to the NASDAQ was meaningless and would be reversed anyway, treated me like a schoolboy, like I didn't know what I was doing... bad...

That market share was incredibly important... It was never reversed... The Nasdaq is technically in the cleaners... John Thain sold me a real bill of goods, and then I sold it to you... I take the blame, this isn't John Thain's Mad Money... it's Jim Cramer's Mad Money...

But he did the same thing when he got to MER, telling us he didn't need money after the first big charge and after the first big fund raise... And what does he do?... He does the biggest secondary I can recall... He told us over and over again that he was conservatively reserved for these hard instruments that he sold for $.22 cents on the dollar... Wrong... He told he was head, wrong... Fortunately, big break for Johnny, break for Mad Money, another serial over-promiser and under-deliverer stepped down just last night... That's how their euphemism works in firings these days... Patricia Russo from Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)... And she is freeing up a terrific spot for John Thain... Well you know what?... While we're at it, we can also take down Hector Ruiz, an even better spot for John Thain, who was kicked upstairs for his wonderful work in destroying value at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) over a multi-year period... So I say see you later Patricia and Hector, don't let the door hit you on the way out...

These people lost so much money that it is just a travesty that they stayed on this board for that long... And I'm putting you on, John... Yeah, John, loved you at Goldman too... Not because you wrecked Merrill, John, you didn't... It's still a great brand name... But because you have to be the greatest over-promiser and under-deliverer of the shameful era... Oh, look, the spaghetti o's, the Franco-American concoction that I used when I talked about Patricia Russo first getting on... Well just finish the little food play here... Patricia, the spaghetti o's have spoken...

After this segment, you can see Jim's Lightning Round picks here...