CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Monday that Wall Street managed to avoid a far steeper sell-off as three of the market’s most pressing concerns eased throughout the session.
The S&P 500 finished down 0.48% after falling as much as 0.8% earlier in the day, while the Nasdaq Composite declined 0.56% after being down as much as 1.3%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 152 points, or 0.29%, after losing nearly 300 points at its intraday low before buyers stepped in.
“At one point this morning, it looked like we were just going to crash,” the “Mad Money” host said, reflecting on the severity of early trading conditions.
Significant pain was visible beneath the surface, particularly among stocks tied to the AI data center buildout, which came under sharp pressure.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s weekend essay urging the industry to slow the pace of AI model development rattled markets, sending Intel and Micron each down roughly 5%, GE Vernova dropping nearly 9%, and Eaton losing roughly 8%.
Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio run by CNBC’s Investing Club, holds shares of Intel, Micron, GE Vernova, and Eaton, meaning the sell-off carried direct implications for the fund.
The first source of market relief came from oil, as West Texas Intermediate crude had surged roughly 4% to touch $102 a barrel following Saudi Arabia closing a critical pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz, before giving back most of those gains to settle up just over 1%.
Bond markets also stabilized after the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 5%, reaching its highest level since October 2023, with Cramer noting that this key threshold finally attracted buyers after weeks of relentless selling.
“Something happened that’s been missing the whole time bonds have been on a rampage: buyers, actual buyers, came in and decided that 5% was a good yield,” Cramer said. “That’s right, not everyone hates bonds at any price.”
The third and arguably most significant shift came in sentiment around artificial intelligence, where Amodei’s call for slower model development had raised fears that investment in data center infrastructure could dry up.
“Most important, the biggest theme of our era, artificial intelligence, looked like it was going on the ropes because of a self-induced slowdown mode,” Cramer said. “That could snap shut the biggest spigot of cash in history.”
By the close, however, Cramer expressed confidence that calls for greater AI safety from major players would not meaningfully disrupt the enormous capital flows supporting data center construction and expansion.
“As we got our arms around the forced AI slowdown that the big guns, OpenAI and Anthropic, now seem to favor, we decided it wasn’t the end of the world,” Cramer said. “In fact, we left this session convinced that not much in the data center world would change at all.”
The session ultimately demonstrated how quickly market sentiment can shift when multiple pressures ease simultaneously, with indexes recovering substantially from their worst levels of the day.
