The Bottom Line

Bear Trap

6. What would happen to the telecommunications industry if the Justice Department indicted WorldCom, the company, for criminal fraud and it lost all its government business and it had to close? How much AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, or SBC Communications would you like to own?

7. What would happen if New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, Justice's Michael Chertoff, and the SEC's Harvey Pitt got into a room and agreed that there would be no criminal prosecution of any of the major brokerage houses, and instead they drew up a list of those in the biz who need to be banned for life because they aided and abetted fraud? We could put all of this liability behind us, and the capital markets might start functioning again. We'd save about 200,000 jobs in New York with such a pact.

8. How much tech would you want to own if President Bush decided to call IBM, Sun, EMC, Cisco, and a bunch of other 52-week-low denizens and say, "Here is a blank check; make it so we have a national-state-and-local computer system so the security people at Logan can log in to see if a terrorist might be boarding a plane"? We have nothing like that now, and we need it -- yesterday.

9. What happens if the mutual funds were to decide to keep some cash on hand, rather than just running their funds flat-out, so that, for once, they could handle their clients' redemptions without wrecking the market with their endless selling? We never sustain any rally because the mutual funds are always selling into forced situations, not rising markets. They have no rainy-day money, and it just keeps raining.

10. And finally, what happens if my CNBC television partner, Larry Kudlow, a former Reagan economic adviser, leaves Kudlow & Cramer and becomes George Bush's Bernard Baruch? I have my differences with Larry nightly, but I have no doubt that stocks would bottom if the president tapped Kudlow for ideas to revive the soggy economy. No one in the administration now has anywhere near Kudlow's intellectual firepower or connections to get things done on both sides of the aisle.

No kidding, ten long shots. But wasn't it a long shot that Ford could be in trouble with $23 billion in the bank, as the company had last year? Wasn't it a long shot that JPMorgan Chase could have stumbled as it did? Wasn't it a long shot that Enron was just a total house of cards, or that Adelphia and WorldCom were criminal enterprises? The odds of all of those sure things imploding seemed downright impossible eighteen months ago, but of course they all happened, and in record time.

Hope shouldn't have any place in the stock equation. It works great at the ballpark and at a house of worship. Still, one has to believe that something good could break the bulls' way. Conversely, we know that if none of these ten works, we are at a minimum headed back to Dow 7,200, and if we remain breakless, would anyone be surprised to see us back to Dow 5,000, its stamping grounds from a decade ago?

So, here's to wishing, and be prepared if fairy tales don't come true.

James J. Cramer is co-founder of TheStreet. com. At the time of publication, he owned stock in Verizon. He often buys and sells securities that are the subject of his columns and articles, both before and after they are published, and the positions that he takes may change at any time.