10AM Hour 5/20/26

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Sara Eisen (1:06)

Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. It's NVIDIA Day on Wall Street as the world's largest company gets set to report earnings in just a few hours. We'll help get you ready for those results ahead of our big interview airing tomorrow with CEO Jensen Huang. Plus, Mohammed Alarian is here with us at Post 9 His thoughts on the global jump in bond yields and what it means for the equity market. Plus, we'll talk to the CEO of Sotheby's as their May art sales jumped 70% from last year, already nearing a billion dollars. What that tells us about the overall market.

But guys, I wanted to start with some consumer commentary since we did have a slew of earnings from consumer-centric companies. And the read is it's pretty decent, some warnings in there. TJX though, how about that? Really strong. All of our divisions delivered strong comp sales growth and increases in consumer transactions. The second quarter is off to a good start. TJX always sort of performs better than the rest in the last few years in this environment. But no sign of weakness from the consumer there, stock up another 5 percent. Low CEO on the macro environment. While do-it-yourself demand remains under pressure, we're continuing to grow market share in a challenging housing environment, shaped by elevated interest rates, higher costs, and low housing turnover. We know the problems that have been plaguing the housing market. I don't think that's anything new. They summarize it there, and that tells you that there's still obviously weakness as we continue to see these new highs on the 30-year, which tracks mortgage rates. Kava, fast casual. We try to incorporate the guidance in the guidance, the challenges that consumers are facing around them and the uncertainty from the geopolitical conflicts and increases that prices of the pump. So we've tried to incorporate that into our guidance, but we have not seen a deterioration or impact so far in the current year. That is, I would say, encouraging, maybe a little bit more downbeat from Chewie Sumit Singh on the consumer. He was speaking at a conference this week, said in the last couple of months, we are continuing to see and interpret the consumer as being more stretched than we were when we entered the year. But guys, you know, first quarter, I think what we're seeing is that maybe some of the weakness in consumer sentiment and the higher prices at the pump was balanced out by these higher tax refunds that we got. And I think the question is, what happens for the remainder of the year? Because that is a one time impact. And can the consumer continue to remain, you know, resilient because the consumer is hung in there? And that's been the story of earning season.

Carl Quintanilla (3:38)

It's a discussion about duration for sure. I see Citi today takes their Brent forecast to 120, a bull case of 150, even GasBuddy, which does a pretty good job of monitoring retail gasoline prices, says you're probably looking at 480 a gallon for the summer. And again, we're back to how long does this last?

Sara Eisen (3:56)

How long does this last and how much of a cushion is there, right? Because we have fairly low unemployment rate. We have wages that are still growing. They're not growing as fast as they were in the prior years.