10AM Hour: Jefferies Chief Market Strategist, Investing in AI & Manhattan Rents Surge 8/21/26

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**Sara Eisen** (1:01)
Good Friday 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. Coming up on today's show, stocks looking to rebound today, though still pacing for losses on the week. We'll talk to one market expert about the two emerging factors he says could be real issues for the bull market. Plus, we'll speak to a late stage private investor whose holdings include Anthropic and Databricks about the upcoming flood of major IPO's. And David Zervos from Jefferies will join us ahead of next week's Jackson Hole meeting for the Fed. As big questions remain around the Treasury Department's intervention and the impact on the Central Bank. But guys, I wanted to start off with a read on the economy because this has been the week of retail earnings. So we got some fresh comments on the consumer which drives the US economy and how the US consumer is doing. Listen to some of the highlights from what we heard.

**Scott Bessent** (1:52)
Consumer credit keeps performing better. Delinquencies improved again this quarter.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:57)
We did see consistent, strong top line growth across the months and across income brackets as well.

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:02)
They continue to be very resilient. It's amazed me at how consistent that they've been.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:08)
On the trends in Q3, we're seeing transaction growth improve. Throughout the quarter, we saw broad based demand across the business.

**Sara Eisen** (2:18)
Pretty bullish, pretty strong read. And yes, there's nuances there. For instance, the Walmart CFO, John David Rainey, did tell us there still continues to be caution and value seeking. But I think the important fact here that we learned from these companies is that there was no big changes, no deterioration, no weakening on the consumer. Something Michael Fidelky, the CEO of Target, told me, very consistent in what they've been seeing from the consumer, choiceful consumer, value conscious consumer. There's nothing in terms of weakening spending. For all the talk of, we are seeing higher oil prices, we are seeing these kind of affordability challenges come through in the surveys. And yet, the consumer is still spending.
The unemployment rate remains pretty healthy. People may be having this YOLO philosophy, where they're spending on experiences and they're spending on stuff. But that continues to be the story of this economy. Secretary Besant, we asked the Treasury Secretary yesterday about his read on the economy right now. Listen to what he said.

**Scott Bessent** (3:21)
The Atlanta GDP now number is 4% for this quarter. That's a very noisy number, so don't quote me on that. But everything we're seeing in terms of revenue growth at companies is up about 12%.
So the underlying economy, I think, is very strong. And the only inflationary impulses that we're seeing are coming from the energy, which is temporary.

**Sara Eisen** (3:46)
By the way, the strength of the economy and the consumer could be one reason that rates are staying elevated and high, which we know the Treasury has been intervening in lately. But that does argue for higher yields.

**Carl Quintanilla** (4:00)
I mean, we did just have the worst retail sales drop in over a year.
On a month on month, worst control group since January 25 We've had negative job prints, what, a third out of every month since Trump 2 began?

**Sara Eisen** (4:14)
Well, the two negative data points in July were jobs and retail sales. No question about that. So we'll see. We got to watch that. And we'll see how that shakes out. However, I mean, if you look at some of the other data we got this week, we got initial jobless claims. They were better than expected. Again, fewer Americans filing for unemployment claims. The Philly Fed index came in a lot better than expected. Leading economic indicators came in better. The ADP weekly jobs up 9.5 thousand. That was better than the week before. So a lot of the data has been better. But of course, we'll watch it. One month is not a trend make. And then we showed the indeed job postings index. Just wanted to show that as a gauge for hiring and job postings. Level of job postings continues to be in expansion territory, 101.8. So above 100 is expansion, below is contraction. Interestingly, if you're a software engineer for that category, that's lower than 100 That's the weak spot in terms of the hiring market. But overall, these trends continue to be solid. So we'll see whether the job weakness continue. The other thing that Besen said about the weakness in jobs, which I asked him about, was that now that we've had all these deportations, the Americans that are getting the job, we don't have to have such big numbers because we do have a full employment.