Iran Conflict and Stocks' Wild Ride, South Korea's Kospi Plunges 12%, Pain At the Pump 3/4/26

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This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

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 Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber, and host of the New York Stock Exchange. Markets are stabilizing as the Iran War moves into day five. PegSess says the U.S.-Israeli effort is winning, quote, decisively and devastatingly. Got oil below 74, VIX below 23 European markets are up, but that's after a nasty session for Asia with the Cospi's worst day in history. Our roadmap begins with a memory sector sell-off, fueling that record plunge in Asian markets as the conflict drags on. Wall Street, though, looking for a bounce.

David Faber (1:40)

Plus those continued warning signs in the credit markets. Investors remain on edge over rising worries of bad loans and a lack of liquidity. And it has been blacklisted by the Pentagon, but Anthropics Cloud reportedly still in use by the military. This for the Iran war. And source tells CNBC the company is on track to generate almost $20 billion in revenue. It was doing a billion 14 months ago.

Carl Quintanilla (2:07)

Let's begin with the markets, though, following yesterday's volatile session, which saw the Dow fall more than 1,200 points before closing with that 400-point decline. Bluechip Index has lost about 1,000 points since Thursday's close, Jim. This interesting pattern last two days where we do open low and try to recover through the course of the day.

Jim Cramer (2:25)

We have a huge amount of margin sales in Korea. Again, down 12% last night. But the stock that I monitor from Korea, and remember that's a market heavily concentrated on SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, is Sandisk. And Sandisk started jumping. You could say it's a meme stock. Doesn't matter. It's real. It's a real memory stock. It started jumping very, very early on this morning, which tells me that you may not have the margin problem. And when I say the margin problem, some of the spillovers that, if you are trading actively in the Korean market, of which they do have tremendous active traders, what you do is you sell here. And I think that if we break that pattern, we may not have the down opening that has really been characterized by these last couple of weeks.

Carl Quintanilla (3:04)

Well, certainly, it won't be today.

Jim Cramer (3:06)

At least we don't think so. No, it won't be today. I also think that if you wanted to monitor yesterday, I mean, typically, you monitor an NVIDIA, by the way, there's a big bar of NVIDIA movie in the stock up. Or you might think Tesla, I don't know yet. For all I know, you might look at Amazon. You may look at Microsoft. Yesterday, you looked at the stock of Blackstone. And when it bottomed, the market bottomed. And when it started going up, the market started going up. And incredibly, it almost went to the positive. And it might challenge that today. And does that signify some sort of peak in the crisis?

David Faber (3:41)

Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I mean, I think it was Jon Gray sitting here. He did an interview, obviously answered all the, what I think are relatively difficult questions at this point.

Jim Cramer (3:51)

He comes on.

David Faber (3:52)

And only the way that he can.

Jim Cramer (3:54)

But he calms the market. Yeah. Craig Packer comes on. And he doesn't come.

David Faber (3:59)

That's true. In fact, you talk about Gray, why not give people a little bit of what he said? Because your point's a good one, Jim. It did seem to quiet at least some of the fears around Blackstone at the very least, and certainly did bring a recovery in many of the alternative asset managers' stock prices. We talked a lot about, obviously, lack of liquidity in certain funds, concerns about defaults, though they may not be real. And what he's seeing, this is the disjointed environment that Gray discussed.