11AM Hour: Dan Niles on Tech Earnings, Looking Ahead to the Fed & AI's Circular Funding 7/27/26

**Carl Quintanilla** (0:00)
The board recommends approving...

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**Sara Eisen** (1:05)
Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Sara Eisen, live at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Today it's the busiest week of the quarter. Four hyperscaler giants are going to report. We have a Fed meeting, continued geopolitical risks. Just how should investors be positioning? We'll talk about it with Lazard's Chief Investment Officer and veteran tech investor Dan Niles.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:24)
Plus fresh concerns about AI-fueled cyber risks following OpenAI's rogue agent hack. But just how real is the threat? We are joined by one AI expert who says the cyber capabilities are approaching that of a digital nuclear weapon.

**Sara Eisen** (1:36)
We'll take a look at chip maker CXMT.
Shares surging after its market debut, the company becoming mainland China's most valuable listed firm. Crazy whipsaw action to start the week. We had a pretty nice open, lost about a percent in today. S&P went briefly red. The Nasdaq has done the same. Treasury yields have been a little bouncy here, up to 466, and we'll keep our eye on the VIX, as we mentioned earlier, got down to 17 and change, and then zoomed back up above 19

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:07)
I mean, no shortage of trading catalysts when it comes to the macro. We'll get the Fed meeting this week, the PCE inflation read, and then on earnings, so many reports from Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola to Amazon and Meta. For more on the market setup to kick off the week, let's bring in Lazard Asset Management CIO, Eric von Nostrand. He's also served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under the Biden Administration. Eric, welcome back.

**Eric von Nostrand** (2:31)
Good to be with you.

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:31)
Good to have you. So how do you think we're set up from here after a series of rotations and into an event-heavy week?

**Eric von Nostrand** (2:39)
Series of rotations is a great phrase, I think, for the way markets have been thinking about the war over the past four or five months now.

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:45)
The war and the AI trade a little bit.

**Eric von Nostrand** (2:47)
The war and the AI trade both have done a decent job faking out some of the market narrative.
We're this morning in a bit of an upcycle in terms of sentiment around escalation in Iran. But I think the fundamental supply picture that's been disrupting markets, scaring oil markets for the past couple of months is likely to persist, even if it feels good, on a little bit of a retrenchment this morning.

**Carl Quintanilla** (3:09)
So market underestimating that, you think, in the oil market?

**Eric von Nostrand** (3:12)
I think market isn't taking, they're not taking the full constellation of supply risk from the war seriously enough. Now they've started to price it in over the past couple of weeks. That's why the S&P is still at the bottom of its post-war range.
It's off the elevated peaks it got to a couple of weeks ago, when everyone thought this was all over and done with. But markets are, I think, coming to record with the fact that the volume of supply that used to flow out of this trade of hormones is going to take a lot longer to get to retail consumers and families of the developed world. And that's got oil markets jittery.

**Carl Quintanilla** (3:43)
Yeah, but we saw that. We've seen that in the last few weeks. And the economy and the consumer held up relatively well. I know they said that they were upset about it. But they continue to spend. That's right. The market held up well. We still have the AI trade and a massive flow of capital and investment in terms of infrastructure build. So we can handle it.