10AM Hour: Tech's Historic Quarter (& What Comes Next), SCOTUS Birthright Decision, & LIVE: Fed's Beth Hammack 6/30/26

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**Carl Quintanilla** (0:43)
Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber, Leslie Picker here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Sara Eisen's on assignment today at the ECB forum in Central Portugal, where she's got a great lineup today, including a campus interview with Cleveland Fed President and voting member Beth Hammack, conversation of BOE Governor Andrew Bailey, and also ahead this hour, it is the final trading day of the first half of the year. We're going to talk to Citi Scott Cronert about why he's turning more cautious on tech and former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos is with us to talk about the cyber risks around the latest AI models from the US and China.

**David Faber** (1:19)
First, so let's get consumer and employment data. It just crossed and Rick Santelli has it for us, Rick.

**Rick Santelli** (1:25)
Yes, David, let's look at job openings and labor turnover, known as Joltz on this Employment Week. It's a main number. Expecting a number just under 7.3 million comes in much better than expected. 7,594,000. We do have a revision lower in last month from 7.618 million to 7.585 million, which means we are now sequentially higher than last month, but we did have that reversal on last month. Now, 7,594,000 now would be the best reading of the year. To find a higher number than that, you are now going back towards, wow, you're going back towards May of 24 So, solid gains there, and of course, we do have the employment data on Thursday due to the 4th of July closure on Friday. Consumer Confidence, this is a June number. Headline comes in weak at 91.2.
Also a downward revision of 93.1 last month becomes 90.6. 91.2 then becomes the best read, well, just since April of this year. If we look at the present situation, also a miss, 116.4, sequentially lower than a downward revised 119.4, and 116.4 would be the lightest read, going back to, wow, we're going back to Feb of 21
Finally, what lies ahead are expectations, a miss on expectations, but this one is sequentially lower due to revision, 74.4. Last month, it was exactly the same number. It now gets downgraded to 71.4. 74.4 would now be the best reading of the year, going back to Dec of last year, 74.6. So pretty disappointing on confidence.
Jolt's looking pretty good, and that's what the market's paying attention to. Right now, we see that yields are at the highs of the session, 4.4 in a 10-year. That's up two basis points. Leslie, back to you.

**Leslie Picker** (3:36)
All right, Rick, thank you so much. Stock's wrapping up a volatile first half of the year today, the best first half for the Dow in five years, and the best quarter for the Nasdaq since 2020 Our next guest just downgraded. Yes, downgraded InfoTech. That sector to market weight. Joining us now is Citi Head of US Equity Strategy, Scott Cronert. Scott, why don't we start there?
Because this has been a sector that's obviously provided decent outperformance over the last how many years.

**Scott Cronert** (4:04)
Yeah, at the starting point, it's been a great year this past quarter, right? We have to acknowledge how strong the move has been and how supportive the semiconductor fundamentals in particular have been to the tech trade. The way we see it setting up, and we've been on the bullish side of this for a couple of years now, is that we're probably due for a bit of a, let's call it a face-off here. We're going to be contending with the price hikes that we're seeing on the memory side of the semiconductor equation facing off against the ROI discussion around the hyperscalers. We think that this is probably going to be a theme that we hear much more about through the Q2 reporting period. You throw on top of that our expectation, the most enterprises will be talking about, yeah, commitment to AI but wanting to rationalize and be more focused on their spending around this. All of this we think increases the noise level around the tech trade that's done so well for so far this year.