After the Sell-off: NEC Director Brainard on Jobs Report, Sec. Yellen in China, J&J's $12.5B Deal 4/5/24

Carl Quintanilla (0:00)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber, and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

Good Friday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber has the morning off. Futures are trying to bounce after Thursday's decline, and as March jobs crush estimates 300, 3000, employment rate falls, so does annual wage growth, lowest in almost three years. Our roadmap's gonna begin with that report, the strong payroll number providing some new challenges, perhaps, for the Fed, the Treasury Secretaries in China delivering a stern message about that country's treatment of US businesses, and some health care M&A. J&J striking a deal to acquire medical device maker Shockwave Medical in a $12.5 billion cash deal.

Let's begin, though, with the market reaction to this jobs number, Jim. Unemployment down to 38, LFPR up a tick or two, that's nice.

Jim Cramer (0:53)

Yeah, look, I didn't mind this number because in the last few weeks, the narrative have come that maybe we're not, maybe the consumer's gotten more frugal, maybe there's not been a lot of spending.

And you've seen that the retail stocks all come down. This number says, look, don't worry about that.

It's not going to be a precipitous decline. I think that the whole narrative of when they cut, will they cut, we gotta kind of get away from that. What we have to say is like, you know what?

Economy's healthier than we thought because next week we're gonna be talking about profits. We're not gonna be talking about the Fed. And this number gives me hope that profits will be okay at the consumer level, where I was beginning to work.

Carl Quintanilla (1:29)

We are gonna talk to Lael Brainard later on this morning about the jobs number, but quickly, some forensics on yesterday. You did not buy that this was a Kashkari-driven setup.

Jim Cramer (1:38)

Oh, no, I mean, it was 138 that you saw this sudden shoot up in oil, which seemed to be very much related to stories in the mid-east.

And then we had a huge flight to quality. And then Kashkari spoke, so it actually was the opposite. It was interest rates were reacting to flight to quality. And it became Taiwan, it became Ukraine, but it was always, I think, the undercurrents mid-east. And the fact that oil was almost at $100 a barrel was considered to be worrisome, not from the inflationary point of view, but from the point of view that we feel something could happen this weekend, which is why I still don't trust this number. I really, I am worried about something happening.

Carl Quintanilla (2:15)

Does that mean you would not necessarily want to go long into the weekend?

Jim Cramer (2:18)

I just think that, nope, the people won't want to go long. I think that we're almost oversold. I think that if oil starts ticking up again, even though we have a lot of supply, that's worrisome. When you have oil ticking up and yet there's a lot of supply, and we do have a glut right now in our country, when you had interest rates going the wrong way and then you had kashkari, and kashkari was not a factor, you would think that maybe interest rates would be going up on kashkari. It didn't happen, they went down. So it's world events versus these numbers. And if we didn't have world events, I think that what people would say is, you know, we can rotate back to the areas that we've been selling for the last few weeks.

Carl Quintanilla (2:53)

Right, interesting piece in the journal today about energy.

Gasoline inventories, for example, down five-year low for this time of year. You got gasoline average 360 here. Nice chart out of Piper looking at when energy leads equities. Mark, multiples tend to suffer a bit.

Jim Cramer (3:11)

Yes, they do. I mean, it's really interesting, by the way, Exxon had a miss. They pre-announced, and the stock was up anyway. Chevron had just a huge move here. The mass-limited partnerships are going big.

And yet, when you look at the actual inventories, we're okay. It's the refiners that are making all the money. This is a Valero-led rally. I don't like those because those are the least value added. I mean, if you ask me which is the most value added to be AI, the least value added is refinery. All they do is just, I mean, there's two kinds of refinery. There's the booze refinery and the soil refinery, and they're both pretty simple products.