10AM Hour: SpaceX Briefly Regains IPO Price, The Case for No Rate Hike, Berkshire Puts Cash to Work 8/10/26

**Sara Eisen** (0:00)
The board recommends approving...

**Mike Santoli** (0:01)
Regarding that seat on the committee, we're promoting...

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**Sara Eisen** (1:06)
Good Monday morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with David Faber and Mike Santoli, live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Quintanilla is off today. Stocks are getting off to a mixed start here as the major averages come off their best week since April, and S&P 500 comes off a record close. We'll talk about the setup for a busy week ahead. Plus, tech portfolio manager Dom Rizzo with us, why he says valuations still look reasonable, and the one buzzy name he says has become one of his largest new bets. Also, we'll get into the news that's sending Intel shares lower this morning, now down more than 4 percent. But guys, we have a busy week of economic data, and a lot of people are focusing on Friday's jobs report being shockingly negative, because that was the first negative number we saw on jobs since February, and a big miss from what was consensus and a revision lower. There are some things to look at as deeper into the headline number, and one of those was construction. That was a bright spot, and it has not been a bright spot for a while, and I think it does speak to all the investment and spending and building on AI data centers. That was a 22,000 increase for manufacturing construction jobs. That's good to see for the economy. The White House is going to be happy about that one.
The other chart I wanted to highlight that people are kind of scratching their heads over. So we did see the unemployment rate come down 4.1 percent, but it was for the wrong reason. It was because labor force participation continues to come down, and it's now at the lowest level since 2021 And so some people are wondering about that. Is that AI or people just being discouraged and leaving the workforce? I'll just say one thing, which is the St. Louis Fed did have a paper on this recently. The methodology in, I mean, this is a boring, unsatisfactory answer, but the methodology changed in terms of gathering this data and reporting this data. I would also say that the share of the population for older Americans is increasing. That's a huge part. And that is a big part of it as well, and that those people eventually drop out of the labor force. So that could be disproportionately impacting it, which is all just to say it's never as simple as just the negative headline number and the 4.1% unemployment rate, all things that the Fed has to consider. The last one I would think that the Fed is going to be watching carefully is the wage numbers, the average hourly earnings, which were pretty benign. If we really have this kind of inflation price spiral that the Fed should be traditionally worried about with higher inflation, you would typically see higher wages as well to sort of higher wages. People have to pay more for stuff as well, so they're getting paid, but they have to spend more inflation. Not seeing it in the wage numbers, so there are questions about how big of an inflation problem we ultimately have, where the Fed would need to fight it. We'll get CPI on Wednesday.

**Mike Santoli** (3:49)
There's a lot of play in terms of scrutinizing the report. I mean, first of all, prime age labor force participation, which is measured separately, it's 25 to 54, actually ticked higher in the month, just slightly. It's 83.4 percent, so that's not really alarming. And then there was a lot of, I guess, picking apart the seasonal adjustment factors. It was leisure and hospitality, and it was state education and things like that, that were particularly weak. Maybe that's going to come out in the wash.