"Jobs Wednesday," Robinhood Slides, Mattel Plummets 2/11/26

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Jim Cramer (0:59)

It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

Carl Quintanilla (1:06)

Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber, Mike Santoli at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer has the morning off. Futures do bounce here on this jobs Wednesday and it's a barn burner, $130K, about two times the estimate, highest since April. Unemployment ticks down a tenth, but those revisions take the average job gain for last year down from about $49K a month to just $15K. Our roadmap begins with this strong jobs number, what it means for the future of Fed rate cuts.

David Faber (1:35)

Plus brokerage stocks, the latest to get hit over fears about how AI will disrupt that industry. And there's a developing story that we're watching closely. The FAA closes the airspace around El Paso, Texas for 10 days. We've got some new headlines crossing on that.

Carl Quintanilla (1:53)

Let's begin though with market reaction to this jobs number and the revisions that we just got. 130, as we said, is the highest since April for job gain, although almost entirely, Mike, private education and health care. Retail adds only one and leisure hospitality adds only one.

Mike Santoli (2:10)

Yeah, and obviously that's been the underlying long-term trend. And still being taken by the markets as a positive, a sign that the overall labor market is holding together, especially given a lot of the demographic and labor supply headwinds. Market worked itself into a point of anticipating a much weaker number, not just the past revisions, which were lower than expected, but also the bond market started to rally, you got yields low, you had the two-year kind of pushing its lows for this cycle. And this at least refreshes the idea that the economy has a decent amount of momentum going into this year. I don't think it changes the overall story. I'd be really interested to see within the market what rallies. If it's going to be kind of an everything sigh of relief, because you do have the NASDAQ actually up today as well, or this is just people saying, hey, this is exactly the reason the cyclical strength was there. I think consumer is going to be the focal point, because that's been within the cyclical trade, the weak area, except for housing. Home builders have actually started to rally rate-sensitive stuff. So I think watching the back and forth along that line, we are downwardly revising fourth quarter. So I think it's kind of a steady as she goes type picture, if you really want to take it back a year in terms of both jobs and expectations for how the economy can perform. We know the fiscal push is coming. We know what the corporate capex story is. Question is, you know, we're going to be hollowing out the job market further.

I guess not last month, anyway.

David Faber (3:40)

I continue to just wonder when we're really going to start to see the impact of AI. We talk about it and as we will right now, the dislocations we're seeing in the stock market as a result of the fears of AI replacing various lines of software or insurance brokerage or, I mean, you name it. But it's not clear yet that we've really seen anything reflected in a significant way in terms of it replacing actual humans doing a job. I'm going to get to that in a moment. But that comes up now, certainly in every conversation and even with people like Kevin Hassett who we've talked to about it as well. It's just very much unclear to me, but I can't help but not think what this year is going to look like, particularly with the rising level of commentary we're getting from certain people in the industry. As we watch Claude replicate the next version of itself.