Cooler Inflation, TikTok and Musk, Cramer Interviews Eli Lilly's CEO 1/14/25

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Carl Quintanilla (0:59)

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 Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer's in San Francisco at JP. Morgan's annual healthcare conference. Futures are adding to Monday's gains as the bulls finally get some relief on PPI. Unchanged on core ahead of CPI tomorrow. Yields are dropping modestly. Ten years still around 478 Our roadmap's gonna begin with TikTok's Musk option. China officials reportedly discussing options, including allowing a trusted non-Chinese party to take control of TikTok's US operations. TikTok, for its part, calls those reports, quote, pure fiction.

David Faber (1:43)

Plus the housing and retail read on the economy. KB Home shares their surging on up-beat guidance, while shares of Signet tumble on week holiday sales and lower guidance. And Eli Lilly expects its new weight loss pill, and that's the gear, of course, a pill, to be approved next year. We're gonna talk with CEO David Ricks later this hour.

Carl Quintanilla (2:05)

Let's kick things off with markets and PPI, Jim. Pretty interesting internals. Food costs down a tenth, vegetables down 15 Medical care pretty flat.

Jim Cramer (2:16)

Carl, these, the bonds just don't want to react to anything good. Of course, we can immediately say it's because we're gonna get a tough CPI number tomorrow. The fact is, is that these numbers are tamed. People have to start recognizing that there are some good numbers coming. We're gonna be talking about KB Homes in a moment. House prices are coming down, food coming down, but it doesn't seem to matter. What the bonds are reacting to, I think, is the new administration concerned about what is going to be tariffs, even though it looks like they're gonna be phased in. You know, David, the interest rates don't want to come down here. And they don't want to come down. There's too much issuance. There's a belief that the next administration is much more inflationary. And David, it doesn't seem to matter what is printed. The bonds don't want to go higher. Interest rates are not low.

David Faber (3:00)

Yeah. Well, it's the unknown. And right now, I guess the judgment about the unknown is it's going to be more inflationary, Jim. And when I say the unknown, we talk about, of course, so often here, as we will, the depth of the tariffs, how broad they're going to be, not to mention, of course, deportation policy. And again, how deep and broad that's going to be, because both will have potentially inflationary impact. Obviously, there seems to be more debate about the inflationary impact of tariffs than there does about really deporting a lot of parts of the workforce.

Jim Cramer (3:35)

I think that's a mistake. We look at KB Homes, which is the first good report we've had when it comes to housing. And look, labor's still tight. People can't find enough skilled workers. I mean, the numbers were okay. I know that the margins were not what I wanted. Some of that is also because they have to do some price concessions because mortgage rates have moved up. But Carl, I see a market. I don't want to say that nothing good can happen because KB Homes is just soaring on the idea that it wasn't worse than expected. But we just have a cloud over everything. And I just think that anytime you get too excited about stocks, yesterday we got excited about stocks and it was only the Dow stocks, it was not tech. I think you find yourself saying, well, why did I bid things up? I'm not negative here, I'm not positive here. I think that reflects, Carl, the mood of this market.