11AM Hour: First Solar CEO on New Tariffs, Columbia Sportswear CEO on Tariff Refund & Wheaton Precious Metals CEO on Earnings 8/7/26

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Regarding that seat on the committee, we're promoting...

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**Carl Quintanilla** (1:00)
Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Cima Modi here at Post Night at the New York Stock Exchange. Sara Eisen is off today. An unexpected loss in jobs in July. We're going to break down what that signal means for the next Fed meeting. As the major indices rise, going for a second straight week of gains.

**Cima Modi** (1:15)
Then the CEOs of First Solar and Wheaton Precious Metals will join us. First Solar getting a boost on newly announced tariffs and Wheaton jumping on the heels of a record quarter.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:25)
Plus, we'll talk to the CEO of Columbia Sportswear as the company receives more than $70 million in tariff refunds. How that's impacting the latest quarter, especially in the apparel business. As for the markets, best week for Dow S&P going back to April, Dow's adding on another 160 here, back above 77.50. Most sectors are green with the exception of staples, financials, and energy as we do have Brent back to 83, a little bit higher this morning. Getting some breaking news as well from the New York Fed for one turn to Steve Leesman. Hey, Steve.

**Steve Leesman** (1:57)
Carl, good morning. Yeah, short-term inflation expectations from the New York Fed's Consumer Estimation Report were down slightly and medium long-term were unchanged. Let's take a look at the numbers here. The one-year 3.6, that's down 0.1 percentage points, and unchanged on the three-year and five-year, which are the two numbers the Fed watches a little more closely, still a little bit above expectations there.
Good news for the Fed, they're not going up, it's still a lingering problem that they remain elevated above the 2%.
Target price expectations for gas, up 1.4 percentage points to 2.9%, price expectations for medical care and rent falling, and for food prices, unchanged. Just one more headline there, expectations for US to the stock market, hitting the highest level since April, 2021, up a half a point to 41.4%.
So, the general public getting in on what's happening in the markets here, a disappointing jobs report suggesting some weakening in the payroll market, but at the same time, in line with relative stability, and I'll explain that. Here's the data, down 23,000 as Carl said, June revised down 37,000 to 20,000, unemployment rate coming down, but coming down because of a decline in the participation rate. So, people dropping out of the workforce. Average hourly wage is also disappointing, down 0.1% in the year over year, just 3.2% losing ground with inflation. But, interesting to look at where the jobs were and weren't construction. That's a strong number there, up 22,000. Manufacturing also doing reasonably well, perhaps some of that from the AI build out. But, retail and leisure and hospitality especially, that could be firings from the World Cup. Local education, well, we'll have to do more investigation on that, but August is a sort of hiring month in that regard. Maybe some issues with federal funding of local education programs, maybe some financial stress at the local education market. What the market do? Well, it reduced the probability of September hike down below 50% now, up to 44%, had been 54% going into the meeting before the jobs number. And December now 58%, that was down from 83% before the number. The new Warsh Fed, I'd say they're unlikely to take much signal from this number, trying to point markets to a new regime that's less data point dependent, more trend dependent, in a world with little or even negative job growth. And a number that has a wide statistical error rate, 23,000 is still, Carl, right in the middle of the range of normal.