verizon thinking about their relationship with vodafone and whether they should buy vodafone's stake out, whether they should consider a full merger. it's probably fair to say, one would imagine that every year these two companies -- >> have this discussion -- >> think about what should our relationship -- they will be normal every year, reviewing what the relationship should be. are they going to decide something. >> it comes in the middle of the cable congress in london. coming off the world congress in barcelona, the way that the mobile industry and fixed line industry are coming together, there's so much pressure on wireless networks. we saw vodafone looking at cable deutscheland, they're trying to get access it more consumers to offset the pressure on their networks. i think we'll see -- there's been a ton of dealmaking already. we're going to talk, in fact, to liberty global ceo in the next -- if only we were in that business. >> yeah. >> okay. let's move on. >>> venezuela's president, hugo chavez, has died at age 58 after 14 years in power. he'd been seriously will consider fo

jim, all this comes back to vodafone.talk to people who have been at verizon and worked with the company for a long period of time, they say, we haven't had a willing partner, because they don't have a strategy. british company run by an italian guy, assets all over the place. they haven't maximized them. the one question, while it is 124, $130 billion market cap, could you start to get an activist component in there. could you say it's time, vodafone for you to sit down, make this happen, we don't care that you don't know what you want to do with the proceeds. get it done, because the stock is extraordinary undervalued, given the value of the underlying asset being verizon wireless. >> this company's valuation should have been going up by the day. so i could see people would be angry. >> but every time it goes down, they seem to be able to surface rumors and talks that put a spotlight on the value of the 45% position. but they never actually get to the finish line. by the way, from ver esizoveriz perspecti perspective, n

talk about the $100 billion vodafone deal. what the heck is happening that a year ago all we cared about was whether -- whether italy was going to go over 7%. now we're thinking this dell deal and three buyers, maybe they paid 15 because they're getting a very solid pc company. personal computer? what do i use? i have hewlett-packard to get in the mix. i'm on a dell. maybe that's the thing. we're keeping them a float. >> i know there is a rival station that has another name in front of it. i wonder if you peel it off if it's dell and it's a sub move by dell. >> i never watched that station. >> you get caught. >> let's say you're a dell shareholder still. you sell now or you wait. >> i thought you sell at $14. i am out of the running of people who can say what you should do with dell. i thought that even at the last minute these guys would drop out because they would do channel checks and see that dell is not

own vodafone for the fundamentals and i would prefer at&t here because if the verizon deal doesn't happenrizon goes back to $45. all right, the bears are overplayed at least for today. tomorrow is a new bad day, right? cyprus couldn't stir up the panic that some people really needed and it doesn't mean i'm sounding the all clear. just the opposite, stick around. there's something else you need to keep an eye on. "mad money" will be right back. >>> serious signal? the market may have ignored the shot from cyprus, but cramer could have found a warning sign that could be more dire than a mediterranean isle. find out how you should prepare. later, game time. cramer has a new take on an old family past time. new this week, he's taking a look at companies with a stranglehold on their industries that may give their stocks a boost. tonight jim's checking out the friendly skies to find out if it's time to take off. plus, food fight. your local supermarket has turned into a battleground for organic food producers, but their struggle for shelf space could be your chance to cash in. cramer price chec

it's not clear if there are talks going on between verizon and vodafone.on. it has been willing and wants to buy what it doesn't already own of verizon wireless. the question is vodafone and whether or not it is really ready to commit itself to that undertaking, selling what is its best asset given the dysfunction that it's seeing in the european wireless market and what the strategy were to find itself with an enormous amount of cash on its hand. what would it do? >> david, i think this is important for one very big reason. we've had a stock market that's levitated, but if you get a transformational deal that is what? $100 billion. >> or more. >> what that says is we're in a brave new world of transaction size. >> yes. listen, it would be verizon borrowing enormously and using its stock and there are so many different issues that are part of this, and there's a question how tax-efficient vodafone can make it and whether there are enough shareholders there that are getting active within the stock and management privately, not necessarily publicly saying yo

vodafone owns 44% of verizon wireless. they wanted that back forever.group says that might actually happen. >> jcpenney is having a monster day after oppenheimer said the retailer's big bet on joe fresh appears to be paying off. let's bring in retail adviser and cnbc contributor and general all around fashionista, stacey, cramer says that it's not the place to be right now. i guess it depends on whose apparel it is. >> yes. that's very true. i mean, if you just line it up, we just got through with q4 earnings. and input costs for very easy this year. you had this natural growth margin lift there. and also now that we're going into q-1 we're facing really difficult comparisons from an early spring last year. so, you know, most of the apparel guys that have given to guidance recently is pretty disappointi disappointing. that includes the teen space and on up the chain here. i would certainly be cautious in g1. >> you know what, stacey, also isi group came up a note that jcpenney could in 300 stores lease out space. actually lease the space. in other words

"squawk on the street" chatted with me about verizon's potential for buying out or simply buying vodafoneyou get a $100 billion deal, lots of banks, making lots of money with very few people doing the heavy lifting. mergers and acquisitions is a lucrative business. huge fees. dell, a played out old tech stock that hasn't been able to move aggressively into higher valuation added portions of the food chain. not everyone is going to win dell but if you like dell, can i interest new a little piece of hewlett packard maybe? potential breakup and sale coming. call a banker, more fees coming. last i heard announced a 60 million share offering. i like the mortgage insurer with capital that has made it. or radiant's deal or the 10 million shares of jcpenney put up by deutsche bank for a quick payday. the bond issuance is coming hard and fast. we've had so many billion dollar issuances, we don't even notice it anymore. but the capital is almost risk free courtesy of our pal ben bernanke. the only real cost, the fees. they all require the same thing, bankers. the housing cycle is back. many of the

buy verizon and vodafone. saying this is going to happen and i talked about that with faber last week and we're talking a $100 billion deal and it's a wake-up call in the same way cyprus is a wake-up call. if we're getting transactions that size that shows tremendous confidence. >> they're been trying to get back their stake with vodafone. should we move on to niningy? just before -- i do like at&t as the place to go if you get hammered today. >> 5% dividend on at&t. >> not bad, right? >> not bad at all. >> nike, i tend to be very suspicious about this kind of call. this is a price target bump, okay? ahead of the -- >> bank of america, right? >> right. they report this week and they were talking about moment up in basketball shoes. they're saying that the futures could be very good. i want to caution that unless they've got real good feel of this thing, you don't like to buy ahead of a quarter for a company like nike that tends to be so opaque. maybe basketball shoes are selling. don't forget, we have a china

that shares haven't yet priced in, quote, the accretion prospects from possible leveraged buyout of vodafoneership. price target up to 54. over two months verizon run up 14% over the past two months. what do you think, jimmy? >> i had to look up what accretion meant. normally that should flash caution. when they start talking about buyout, that can be a powerful price driver. i looked at the chart. to me, if it settles two days ago, higher. it could have a leg higher. i like this call. >> let's move on to morgan stanley, upgrading hewle hewlett-packa hewlett-packard. we see further upside to at least 7x. that's seven times. that's up, big move, jimmy. >> i think we should say shares have doubled in four months twice because that is a powerful move. i'm long hp. i have been long. we talked about this show a couple months ago. free cash flow and the potential for a nice dividend is good but i can't green light something that's rallied 100% in four months. i trimmed back my longs. i'm going to stay long. >> goldman sachs downgrading kimberly clark to sell. throwing out the tissues here to neutr

and short verizon because vodafone owns 45% of verizon wireless and verizon owns 55%.e were creating the stub at a pretty inexpensive price. >> anything else that you like? >> you don't like the consumer. >> we're cautious. we're scared of how the government keeps putting money in people's market. the government trumped 2.4 million jobs and they didn't talk about the 1.9 million people on food stamps and snap program. so we're just very, very cautious. >> you're a new york, l.a. california guy. >> i'm not sure where this is going. >> you're not drinking the kool-aid on the big government? >> no. >> steve, thank you for being here. >> it's been a lot of fun. >> thank you. make sure you join us tomorrow. "squawk on the street" begins right now. ♪ ♪ ♪ >>> good wednesday morning. welcome to "squawk on the street." i'm melissa lee with jim kramer and scott wapner. carl quintanilla and david faber have the week off. let's take a look at how we are setting up in the united states. we are looking at a strong open higher and the dow up at 79 points and yesterday we did see sign

huh, we'll way in, and as we break, look at the winners on the the nasdaq, monster beverage, ebay, vodafonek. ♪ let the madness begin. ncaa men's basketball big dance underway today, and tv ad revenue for the tournament expected to break the bank. diane is on for every good story today. diane: for basketball fans, march madness usually mens for hopes for winning a bracket, a team, and for businesses, reduced productivity because we focus on brackets and teams. select group says advertising is big spending. total television ad revenue for the ncaa men's basketball tournament topped $1 billion for the first time last year, surpassing every other professional post season, and this year, it's expected to be bigger. as of 2011, every tournament game is aired nationally, producing inventory compared to earlier years, and this year, it's cbs, tnt, tbs, and trutv. the ad haul is expected to top last year when march madness not just displaced national football as the most lucrative post sport, but combine the post season total from baseball, nba, and nhl. with 68 teams competing, there's more games

one of the reasons vodafone has succeeded so much in africa, the monopoly, they have had a huge vote of the market, the united states markets are not quite developed along those lines so we are struggling with other issues in the old mobile payment space. the other problem, and this again -- when you have a lot mobile payment when something goes wrong, the consumer does not necessarily know where something went wrong. it could be in the handset, could be in the cross where operating system, it could be the telecom carrier, could be the merchant, it could be their own bank, there are all these different points of context. the regular space has not figured that out yet. and you know there are different regulators for each of those four or five touch points. we do have to come to grips with that. will be an issue now and well into the future. the idea of small entrepreneurs and small businesses being able to access and use these new payment mechanisms is really interesting and critical and the innovation space continues there. square is clearly one of those options. we are going to cont

those stocks have been fabulous stocks and you look at verizon maybe doing a vodafone deal.is the apple company and t-mobile. that's why i said this is phoneacide. that's a great pitch. we're the guys that don't subsidize you that have just an okay service. i don't know, caveat emptor. >> is there nothing attractive about separating the cost of the phone from the cost of the service? >> not to care about t-mobile because they do have the sexist ads that are certainly -- >> i think that in the end we want to know how much great p phone power that we can get for little money. they're doing something i don't understand. i'm sure there's some rationale, but this is like jc penney. >> this is the new coupon. >> okay. maybe, hey, man, we're mr. coupon and we offer wi-fi. wi-fi? >> so when you say it's phoneacide. and so therefore in a weird, perverse way you can become more profitable on the phones it does sell. it won't have the at&t, but it's not losing the $450 or whatever the subsidy is per iphone 5. >> i keep thinking of the blackberry this weekend and it launched and 28 seco

this morning, we're led by vodafone up 6.5%. that's a u.k. listing, of course, on potential talk about further tie-up with verizon. that's one corporate piece of news. for the rest of the story, though, it's actually banks that i want to briefly draw your attention to. down here on the stock 600, losing about .2 prcht. in particular, it's rbc that may be the focus. if you're in stamford, connecticut, you may want to listen. mervyn king speaking before a parliamentary committee on banking standards said he thinks rbc needs to be split into -- rbs needs to be split into banks. it's still about 80% owned by the government. we've had a series of people on the program talking about how they don't see how the government can ever exit its stake. mefb inking thinks one way of doing this is to isolate the healthy assets, move forward that way and privatize them. at this point in the game, pretty late, he thinks a decisive restructuring like that could be done in a year. can you imagine the changes that would involve? and can you find another example w

when you talk about a vodafone deal that's on speed dial, i think it's important that these banks werethis -- i like to talk about the four walls of the canvas. the analysts only think about net interest margin. we had schiller on. the atlanta housing values up 10%. so suddenly it makes sense to go buy a house and not rent. you might want to move out of your mother-in-law's place. you might want to do these things. >> you might. you might. >> it does happen. >> goldman, lessen, about 10%. >> that's called return on equity. >> yes. it is. that's an important barometer of progress. >> i believe other than the fact that lloyd's got the beard, which -- >> he got rid of it. >> did he? he didn't have it at the super bowl. but you get m & a, you get agency business. i mean, they put up their own capital. that's a good business, too. i like this hoop so much. >> as you can see, cramer is on the job ready to help you make some money. you'll hear him next in the "mad dash." the jobs number up 236,000, gives us a boost. the jobless rate 7.7%, the lowest since december of 2008. but we can still he