9AM Hour: Stocks and Bessent After the Sell-Off, Oil Prices and the Trump Effect, Walmart Price Target Cut Parade 8/21/26

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**Jim Cramer** (0:57)
It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

**Carl Quintanilla** (1:13)
Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Sara Eisen and David Faber. Live at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange, Cramer has the morning off. Coming off the worst day of the month for Dow S&P. Pretty pre-market bouncing here, but it is still the worst week for the S&P since June, worst week for the Dow in five months. As the bond market challenges Treasury, 10 years stuck at 4.7.
Brent pinned to 94 and this huge rally for gold continues, 14% so far this month. A roadmap begins with stocks looking to rebound. The secretaries push to lower yields, still in focus.

**Sara Eisen** (1:45)
Also ahead, a closer look at oil prices. On track for a second straight weekly gain here as President Trump seeks to ramp up economic pressure on Iran.

**David Faber** (1:53)
Plus a parade of all-street analysts cut their price targets on Walmart, very helpful of course, after the stock had its worst day in about four years.

**Carl Quintanilla** (2:02)
Let's begin with the markets as really centered around the Treasury secretary's appearance yesterday and how the bond market responded. A lot of discussion about how it's teeny tiny, I think, was how the FT put it in terms of the size of these buybacks. And we'll see if Monday changes anything with this pressure.

**Sara Eisen** (2:19)
I think that it wasn't particularly comforting to first you know the Bessent announcement surprise had the desired effect and then it went the other way and then he appeared here on the show on CNBC and a lot of folks were you know he promised more buybacks to do or didn't promise he said he could do more in terms of the firepower and talked about how he felt that the market felt thin than liquidity in August was mispricing some of the risks and the market did not rally both stocks sold off and bonds sold off further and so that led to people wondering look is it is it too tough of a fight when it comes to the treasury market which is you know trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars and the fundamentals of the US economy I mean here's what the secretary said about where he thinks bonds should be.

**Henry Bessent** (3:09)
We believe that the yields don't reflect the underlying fundamentals this Iran conflict. We will get on the other side of this. We don't know when and we can talk about the economic measures we're going to be taking against Iran in a minute.
We believe that the liquidity especially in the 30 year point is very poor.

**Sara Eisen** (3:32)
So there is an argument that the liquidity is poor and that yields are running high because if you look at the fundamental drivers guys of why we're seeing these higher yields right now. Look, there's fiscal. We know that, but that's nothing new, right? I think that markets have been well aware of that. There's the global bond yield move. There's fiscal problems in Japan and in European countries, and we've seen that as well. There's higher oil prices and the inflationary pressure, although we've been at these oil prices, I don't know, a few months ago. So there is an argument to be made for why we're seeing this breakout right now, this bond sort of unfriendly move, that it could be summer liquidity conditions for why you're doing that.

**David Faber** (4:14)
Within the answer itself, there is still uncertainty when he says we'll get on the other side of the saran thing, but we don't know when.

**Sara Eisen** (4:22)
No, but I think his point there is that the inflationary impulse from the higher oil prices is not going to be long lasting and doesn't fundamentally alter the inflation outlook in the long term. And we haven't seen, for instance, the long term inflation pricing, anything. The Fed would say it's very anchored. We're not seeing any sort of break out of that.