Jim Cramer Warns of Journalist-Induced Market Breakdown if ‘Tortuous’ Questions Cause Fed Chair to Slip Up

CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Tuesday he could envision the market crashing if reporters pepper Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell with “tortuous” questions at a Wednesday press conference.

“There’s just this tortuous Q&A thing that he does, where it’s just a nightmare and there are going to be people who just ask about the [producer price index] eight straight times, and they’re going to try and wear him down and maybe at one point he’s just worn down and he goes, ‘Yeah I know we’re buying too many mortgages,’ … or he slips up.

Powell is set to speak Wednesday on the Fed policy statement slated for release at 2 p.m. Wall Street is looking to the statement for information on the Fed may adjust monetary policy in the wake of spiking inflation.

The Fed chair has a history of making comments that provoke downturns in the markets, such as in May 2020 — toward the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic — when he said the market’s decline was “without modern precedent, significantly worse than any recession since World War I.” The Dow Jones declined by more than 500 points in the hours after Powell’s remark.

Cramer said he was prepared to fault the press if a similar scene played out on Wednesday.

“Jay is really practiced, but on the eighth question or the ninth question, I think he’s going to say, ‘Listen, I’m going to look at this,’ and that’s going to freak people out,” Cramer said. “It’s not going to honestly be the statement, I think, it’s going to be much more the endless heckling by the press.”

Watch above via CNBC.

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