Exclusive: Micron CEO, China Stocks Surge, Southwest Investor Day 9/26/24

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.

David Faber (0:08)

Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber with Sara Eisen and Mike Santoli, live from Postline at the New York Stock Exchange. Jim and Carl have the morning off. Let's give you a look at futures as we get ready to begin the trading day. A half hour from now, you can see we are setting up for a significantly higher open. And that is where our roadmap starts. Well, chips, one reason why we're getting a boost is after Micron sees, quote, robust AI demand. The company CEO Sanjay Mehrotra is going to join us just a few minutes from now.

Sara Eisen (0:39)

plus, why billionaire investor David Tepper says it's a, quote, buy everything moment for the Chinese market. And Southwest meets investors, the airline raising its summer revenue forecast and authorizing a $2.5 billion share buyback.

David Faber (0:54)

All right, let's start with the overall rally here, of course, for seeing Micron leading the way this morning. We're going to be speaking, as you just saw, with the company's CEO. Would also love to just get to China as well if we can, Sara, because we've seen a number of escalating moves over the course of this week. The Politburo being the latest, at least in terms of the language used. And David Tepper, who much of Wall Street was focused on this morning during his time on Squawk Box, made that the center of sort of his investment thesis near-term in terms of what he sees. Take a listen to what Tepper had to say based on his reading of what came out of this Politburo meeting.

David Tepper (1:36)

So the question was, was China going to do the things that you want them to do? Okay, are they going to do the easing measures that you want them to do? So yeah, they came the other day, and what's his name, Pan Gongcheng, and I apologize because I can't even speak English well. You know, he came out and he was like jovial. It's like, whoa, jovial saying we're going to cut and we're going to, and we'll give you more. And he said, we'll do more and more if needed. Now, the Chinese say we'll do more and more if needed. They don't say that because it's not been healthy to say those sort of things in China. But they said that the other night, and I've listened very carefully what government officials say. So I took it that they did a lot. They exceeded expectations and they promised to do more and more and more.

David Faber (2:24)

It's where we find ourselves this morning with Chinese stocks up again. And it obviously lending a hand here as well, along with of course the rally in chip stocks.

Sara Eisen (2:31)

Yeah, I mean, finally, China is showing that it's serious about trying to achieve its growth target. So we got the word, and this one is more talk. We didn't get specific policy action like we did with monetary policy over the last few days.

SPEAKER_5 (2:44)

But commitments to doing more to stop the real estate market from declining.

Sara Eisen (2:50)

Yep, which is important.

David Faber (2:51)

That's strong language.

Sara Eisen (2:53)

And again, that was in the Xinhua News, the Chinese state news agency report after the Politburo meeting.

David Faber (3:01)

And this meeting itself, with my understanding of Sara, that it typically is not one that focuses on the economy. And so that was a bit of a change as well. And just again, to Tepper's point, language that is not typical. Again, to your point, right, we don't, we've gotten a bunch of action this week, but we both been sitting here talking about yes, but is it enough? It's not what had been hoped for in terms of at least dealing with the real issues in the property market and or a consumer that has been lagging dramatically.

Sara Eisen (3:31)

And there's some hints that fiscal may be around the corner. And I think that's what got people excited like Tepper. So Reuters also had a report that China is basically looking to issue two trillion yuan of special sovereign bonds this year. It's about $250 billion. And part of that would go towards stimulating household consumption and fiscal spending. Either way, it's enough to put Chinese stocks positive for the year. We saw a big jump in bond yields in China. And there's a lot of excitement that's translating here. I think the 10-year bond yield rose to the highest level since November 2022 Mike, on increased optimism, that they're finally gonna do something about this growth slump.