Big Earnings Week, Alphabet Shares Get Bing-ed, Merck's $10.8B Deal 4/17/23

David Faber (0:00)

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

Carl Quintanilla (0:06)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange. Watching SpaceX this morning, set for the maiden test launch of its new Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. We're gonna stay on top of those developments. Meantime, future's pretty steady.

As the earnings picture heats up, 62 S&P companies this week, including some financials today. Our roadmap's gonna begin with a big week for corporate results. Tesla, Netflix, as we said, a bunch of S&P'ers, Dow component, Schwab and M&T crossing the tape this morning.

David Faber (0:37)

Plus, we're gonna have Google's CEO, or at least we're not gonna have him, but he is saying, AI, well, there's a warning there. Society isn't ready for its rapid advancement and that, quote, it can cause a lot of harm.

And as Carl mentioned, it is SpaceX's most powerful rocket launch ever. We're gonna bring you Starship's maiden voyage. That's gonna be a little bit later, live this hour.

Carl Quintanilla (0:59)

Let's begin a new week for the markets and a busy earnings calendar, Jim. We've had 30 S&P'ers so far. The beat rate's 90%. Best week one in a decade.

Jim Cramer (1:09)

Look, we came in with the lowest expectations.

Last time I was reading, back over JP Morgan, this may have been the best JP Morgan quarter.

I mean, not a lot of loan losses, a huge amount of business. Obviously it took in a lot of money in the second half. They made a lot of money because people have not really pulled out of the low yielding to go into the high yielding yet. David, throughout the ones that we saw last week, people just aren't that savvy. And they're perfectly willing to keep their money in the bank and not move to something higher yielding as fast as you would have thought. So there was more money made as there was a lag, more of a question on how smart the deposit basis.

David Faber (1:50)

Right, I mean, again, they are over time expecting deposits to erode. And it's important to point that out. But they did get this inflow of deposits that we all knew about. We discussed on Friday, we all knew was most likely happening during that two week period, let's call it, in early March.

And they benefited from that. But it was a lot of other things. You know, interestingly though, as the day went on, Wells Fargo did not perform as well. And you were positive on that day.

Jim Cramer (2:15)

Yeah, I mean, some people felt the expenses weren't that good. They had to hire 10,000 people in compliance.

I mean, once again, I thought Charlie Sharp did a good job. They bought back $4 billion worth of stock. They had good loan, really, really excellent loan loss control. But, you know, Carl, this had to have been, this was a bank of scandal. And they are working through, and he's just trying to check boxes.

What a run amok situation this was. And to think that Charlie Sharp was one of the smartest operators in the world has still not completed what happened in 2018 century. It's extraordinary how poorly run, how out of control it was. And Charlie's gonna get it together. One of the reasons why I felt it was gonna be a good year is that I think maybe he finally roots out all everybody else who's left. I don't know how the government let this thing go for years.

Carl Quintanilla (3:10)

Well, two things I wanna get you on. One was small banks on Friday lagged big by five standard deviations. That got a lot of notice. But then we got the data Friday night on bank lending and you had small and large loan growth increasing and emergency lending down for three straight weeks.

Jim Cramer (3:30)

I thought that I was encouraged by everything that came out after the close.

Now, look, it's intermittent. I mean, if you take a look, I think you're gonna see the banks that have just been so hated not go down that much more.

I do think that First Republic, I don't know. I don't know how they're gonna, I think they have to do something there. But David, you know, the regionals are just, I think you're gonna see their hang in. Now, it depends. I mean, State Street, no. Schwab is trying to hold here at 50, but they did pause their buybacks, which people don't like.

David Faber (4:01)