American Airlines Grounded, Big Banks Sue the Fed, Steel Deal in Biden's Hands 12/24/24

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Market Insight and Analysis. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

Sara Eisen (1:05)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Scott Wapner here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl, Jim and David have the morning off. We've got an abbreviated session this Christmas Eve. The stock market will close at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. So an early close. Bond market closes an hour later. And remember, the market's closed tomorrow, resumes full day trading Thursday and Friday. Take a look at Futures as we head into now. What is technically the Santa Claus Rally period? Five final trading days of the year. We've got Dow Futures down about 34 points. Nantech Futures pointed up 62 and S&P Futures higher as well. Our roadmap begins with some news that we broke here first. Big Banks officially filing a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve over stress tests. We've got all the details.

Scott Wapner (1:51)

Also ahead, holiday stress from American Airlines and its passengers today. The carrier halting all flights due to a technical issue. It has since ended that ground stop though. Plus a government panel deadlocked on the Nippon Steel, US. Steel merger. The deal's fate now left up to President Biden.

Sara Eisen (2:08)

We'll begin with holiday travel headaches for American Airlines and passengers. Earlier this morning, the carrier suffering a technical outage that resulted in a nationwide ground stop. Lasted about an hour, was lifted around 8 a.m. Eastern when the airline began boarding flights. I can't think of a worse day for this to happen. We don't really know what the issue was yet, do we?

Scott Wapner (2:30)

That was a technical issue of some kind. And hopefully the flights are going to get back to normal in some reasonable order. Although, you know, big cities around the country, like here in New York, it is snowing this morning, maybe only adding to a little bit of the travel hassle. It had me immediately thinking back to two years ago over the Christmas travel time where Southwest Airlines had that massive meltdown, ended up costing them $140 million in fines. They canceled some 17,000 flights. This obviously not reaching that magnitude. We're still following it, though, to see how deep and how long it does take for this airline to get back on schedule today.

Sara Eisen (3:08)

Today is a big day. FAA expects about 30,000 US flights.

This is Christmas Eve, December 24th, across all carriers. And the FAA has been on top of it. They're the ones that announced that the ground stop was over. American Airlines shares initially dropped about 5.5% pre-market. Looks like they are recovering and headed for a flat open as we wait to assess any damage, delays, potential financial issues, as you mentioned, that have happened in the past.

Scott Wapner (3:36)

The busiest travel season on record. 54 million passengers between December 19th and January 6th. That's the expectation of why anytime something like this happens, you're like, oh man, people trying to get, wherever they're trying to get either last-minute business coming home, obviously traveling for the holiday. It's funny, American Airlines stock has not had a bad year. It's up 25%. You take this story out of the mix altogether, but it's been really dwarfed by the gains that United Airlines up like 130% or thereabouts. Delta Airlines has outpaced American as well. It has that issue with CrowdStrike, which is still ongoing, and those two companies in court, as CrowdStrike tries to get that suit dismissed. But it's been a pretty decent year for airlines. Why? Because the consumer's been pretty good in wanting to travel and spend.