10AM Hour: Bob Iger, Josh Kushner to Buy Lakers, Goldman’s First Reaction to CPI, Lumentum CEO on Earnings 8/12/26

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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. Stocks are mostly higher this morning as the latest read on inflation showed a pullback from June though. The Dow has dipped negative. We'll get first reaction from Goldman Sachs, Chief US. Economist, David Mericle. Plus, we'll get to this move in CoreWeave as the cloud computing stock jumps double digits on strong AI demand, up 19%. Speaking of AI winners, CEO of Lumentum is with us as the optical technology company stock pops. After revenue more than doubles from last year, that name is up 600% over the last 12 months. Guys, let's start on inflation. Pretty much in line, which is good news, I think, for the markets, especially for the markets that are not expecting the Fed to urgently hike rates anymore in September. There's nothing in here that would suggest that they absolutely need to do this. There's the headline number in line, month over month, 0.1, which is what was estimated, take out food and energy, 0.2, which was estimated, core, as I mentioned. Again, June was really soft, right? Remember core in June was zero, so the 0.2 is a little bit higher. But still, we're talking about a year over year pays down to 2.5% on core inflation. That's really good. It's the lowest level since February.
And marks a return to pre-war levels, which is also something. Again, the headline not, but the core, yes. So I wanted to go beneath the headline and get into some of the numbers that showed where the inflation is and where the inflation is not, where we're actually seeing negative numbers. So in terms of the gains, let's just give you a sense of where the gains are. We've seen it in places like motor oil, coolant and fluids, computers. Why?
We know about the memory price chips, right? The shortage causing prices to rise. Airline fares, you feel this, you book this 2.2 percent higher on the month. Fresh fruits was also a hotspot among food for inflation and public transportation. If you look into where some of the deflationary impact was.
Lettuce. You know why? Because we're not buying lettuce because of cyclospora. Lettuce prices came down.
They also say the 16 percent plunge since May 1st, 2026, CDC has received reports of 13,895 lab confirmed cases of cyclospora acquired in the US. That is again, the lack of lettuce deflation. Hotels down 3.3 percent. That actually took the overall shelter number down. That was good to see. Fuel, gas prices, fresh vegetables were also down 2.6 percent. Then the other one we just pulled out guys, because besides lettuce as what's going on, and what we talk about every single day is the computers, the computer parts and smart home. This is a source of inflation here because of again, the input prices that we've seen on memory chips and just the insatiable demand for building out AI. So we're seeing inflation in that sense. But overall, David, as expected and not a hot surprise. And therefore, that's good news.

**David Faber** (4:26)
Right. So where are we on the chances that we get a rate hike?

**Sara Eisen** (4:29)
I mean, it's under 50 percent on September.

**Jim Cramer** (4:31)
I think it's 55 50-50.

**Carl Quintanilla** (4:32)
55 by year end. I mean, the worrisome print on this one was core goods. Month-on-month core goods is the biggest monthly jump since September.