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Welcome to Rumorville, Population: the Market

By Jim Cramer

 About this article:
 Want the bad news? Or the worse news? OK, bad news first: We tend to have whatever side the market is leaning to get exacerbated by the late-afternoon look. Now the worse news: We have now breached Rumorville. What's Rumorville? That's what happened in the 1998 selloff and the 1990 selloff. A few well-placed calls and you can cause a run on even the best firms. Today there was a run on Lehman Brothers' stock. Did you see how easily it rolled over? Then Lehman refuted the rumor. In the interim, it worked. So, if you are a bad guy you say, "Hey, let's buy the Goldman Sachs July 210 puts and play Lehman with it." Do you have any doubt that will succeed? Of course, because the financials are almost always leaps of faith, this stuff can spread like wildfire. You can't do this to Occidental. You can't do...

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