Fed Decision Day and Wall St.'s Rate Debate, Salesforce and Nvidia CEOs Talk AI at Dreamforce 9/18/24

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 wednesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer is at one market in San Francisco after his interview with Marc Benioff last night at Dreamforce. Meantime, the big day is finally here. Fed decision, 2 p.m. Eastern Time, and an even more important press conference. Odds of a 50 basis point cut still outweigh a 25 A road map begins with 25 or 50 as traders debate how big the cut will be. The S&P also eyeing a fresh record at the open.

David Faber (0:36)

Plus, as for that AI trade, well, Jensen Huang says Nvidia is just getting started, while BlackRock and Microsoft team up for a massive new AI infrastructure fund. And an election pause for the fate of Nippon's bid for US. Steel. Why a national security panel has or is delaying its decision?

Carl Quintanilla (0:56)

Let's begin with the decision day for the Fed today and these rate cut expectations. Jim, Fed fund futures haven't really budged much since last night. Sixty five percent odds of fifty.

Jim Cramer (1:05)

I don't know how they get that because I'm just seeing too many companies that are doing incredibly well record after record after record. There are a couple of companies, obviously, that have been hurt by commodities going down. The oil companies certainly have been a big beneficiary of of too much drilling, even though it's president Biden. David, there really isn't a lot of deflation in the system. There's a lot of stabilization, but I find too many companies that are doing well and really call for a slow down.

David Faber (1:36)

I know. Well, that's an interesting way to talk about going into today's decision. Because there are those who say things are not slowing down, and you're talking about a 50 basis point cut. I mean, again, I come back to a couple of people who've said, I don't think we should have any cut at all. Now, they are a minority, to say the least. But from the business perspective, and certainly where you've been spending the last three days, Jim, I know it's nothing about anything slowing down.

Jim Cramer (2:04)

David, if you can claim that you're an engineer of any kind, and probably even a trained one, you're going to get a job out here. There's just a severe shortage of people. Again, when you're talking about all the different foundries that are being built when you talk about Intel, severe shortage of people. We just don't have enough people to do tech. Carl, it is a little existential. When you go from 2 to 1.7 children being born, and when you talk about a sense of we just don't have enough people, you see why the story out here is about the agent, the bot, whatever you want to call it, because that's all about the Fed should listen up. That's all about we can't find workers. It's very important.

Carl Quintanilla (2:44)

Although, isn't it also about the productivity that would allow you to do business with fewer workers, Jim?

Jim Cramer (2:51)

yes. Well, I think that what they're trying to do, when, for instance, salesforce, we can talk about it, is make it so the people who are at a call center can go to another part of the company and make more money than for their company than they would at a call center. I'll tell you, David, one thing that is really interesting is developing. There's kind of like a soto voci war between Microsoft and salesforce, where Microsoft has co-pilot and salesforce is making fun of co-pilot. They're calling it the Clippy, the Clippy, which of course was a come and go technology. David, it could be all out wars in between these two.

David Faber (3:32)

Was Clippy that little thing, that little cartoon character?

Carl Quintanilla (3:36)

Benioff kind of took a shot of Clippy yesterday.

David Faber (3:39)

Yeah, that's what Jim was just saying. Yeah.

Jim Cramer (3:43)

Marc is getting very aggressive on this. He feels that billions are being lost. He calls it out. He calls AI out saying, listen, billions are being lost because it's not used right. A lot of it is because of co-pilot, which he thinks is an hallucinating nut job at times. That's a little extreme. But he just doesn't feel that co-pilot provides any sort of value. People liked it at the beginning and then they've left it. Tremendous presentation about Saks using Marc's, the agent force. It's just so exciting to watch the war and how things are going. Then to see Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, on stage with Marc where he's talking about a level of business that if you're thinking about the next quarter, you're obviously just ill-advised. I would say something else, but I don't want to be too extreme.