In a recent appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Jim Cramer discussed potential actions by the Federal Reserve in response to President Trump’s tariffs. Trump has denied having any plans to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and Cramer commented on the historical context of the current tariffs and Powell:
“Anyone who knows Powell knows that he’s a deep historian of the marketplace. And he’s obviously looking at Smoot-Hawley, the tariff in 1930 and that’s, you could argue, a 33% tariff. And arguing a second that this is higher, and that he knows history, and he knows that Smoot-Hawley was what was one of the things that caused the Great Depression. So, unless you’re ahistorical, you can’t disagree with him.”
The CNBC TV host also discussed how people who were alive during the Smoot-Hawley era are no longer with us so it’s impossible to put it in a real-life framework. According to him:
“Well I mean, we do have Grapes of Wrath, David. Now I think that truth lies in novels. It’s very hard to get the real truth unless you go to novels. . . alright, when you’re a journalist covering homicide, like I was, my editor . . .I try to do this, he goes, Jim that’s for, only fiction can tell the truth about homicide. You just tell the facts. What I’m saying is that if I look at the fiction of what happened in the Great Depression, I have a better feeling than when actually look at the statistics.”
Cramer also stressed that the recent stock market selloff meant that the Magnificent 7, as a term, continued to be irrelevant. “We don’t use that anymore that’s gone,” he said. “Yeah that’s gone. Yeah I don’t know it’s not like the Mag 7. . .no we’re done with that, Mag 7, whole thing. Now it’s the Wild Bunch. . . we’re switching, it’s no more, I mean honestly, Wild Bunch was actually a better movie,” Cramer said.
As for AI, Cramer believes that “[t]his is a winner take all, loser takes none, just like Google was, this is a 200 billion dollar business. Whoever gets the mind share… right now I have every one of these. I’ve got Grok, I’ve got Gemini, I’m not going to go, believe me, one year from now, I’m only gonna have one. And right now it’s Grok.”
On diplomacy, he shared that the “one thing we haven’t done yet is gunboat diplomacy. I’m waiting for that.” So what is Jim Cramer’s gunboat diplomacy? Well, according to him:
“You put something in the straits of. . of every strait, yeah. . the Straits of Hormuz and then of course the Strait of Taiwan. . gunboat diplomacy, the pursuit of foreign policy objectives through conspicuous displays of military especially naval power.”
Our Methodology
To make our list of the stocks that Jim Cramer talked about, we listed down the stocks he mentioned during CNBC’s Squawk on the Street aired on April 17th.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Jim Cramer Praises Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM): “That Earnings Call Was Spectacular”
A close-up of a complex network of integrated circuits used in logic semiconductors.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q4 2024: 186
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM) is the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer. Its dominant position in the market is due to the firm’s leading-edge manufacturing process technologies and the ability to handle sizable orders. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE:TSM)’s shares are down by 24% year-to-date as they have fluctuated in response to investor attitudes towards global trade tensions and AI chip demand. Cramer, however, was left impressed by the firm’s latest earnings call:
“I do know that if you watched Taiwan Semi last week, NVIDIA’s still very much in the driver’s seat. By the way, the Taiwan Semi call was so spectacular that I came away thinking that Microsoft, instead of being, a downgrade Microsoft there by Jackson Ader over a. . . But I felt that when I finished the Taiwan Semi, and of course its subrose that Taiwan to NVIDIA. Not Intel by the way, that was all just false nonsense.”
Overall, TSM ranks 5th on our list of stocks that Jim Cramer discussed. While we acknowledge the potential of TSM as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than TSM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
