Key Market Week, More Tesla Price Cuts, Exxon-Pioneer Deal In the Works? 4/10/23

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 Monday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, post nine of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber back tomorrow. Pre-market a little soggy here, even with yields mostly lower. Big week, obviously, with the jobs number under our belt. We'll get inflation data and first batch of bank earnings on Friday. Our roadmap's gonna begin with the macro backdrop. Stocks and investors set to digest the jobs number. CPI retail sales, as we said, bank earnings on tap. Exxon, eyeing this potential mega deal, reportedly in talks to buy shale driller Pioneer. And Tesla, cutting prices again, the fifth time since January.

Let's begin, though, with the markets kicking off a new week, Jim. A little bit of a rear view mirror, but I do want to get your take on what you thought of the print on Friday.

Jim Cramer (0:51)

Well, I thought the print was sanguine. You kind of look like on the surface that things are cooling a little bit and wages down a little bit.

I mean, I'm sorry. The advance of wages don't have that same, the rate of exchange, as we would say, like the calculus of it's not bad. But there was a Bloomberg story that really caused me to shudder.

It came out later, which is commercial lending fell by nearly $105 billion in the last two weeks of March. Huge chunk was small banks. So then I'm thinking, well, wait a second.

What was the cadence of that labor report? Maybe it went down like this. And travel leisure, of course, is still below where it was in 2019 That's kind of where people are going out still because they're not buying things. But I'm beginning to wonder whether there wasn't something at a regional bank or the smaller banks, which just said, we gotta be careful how much we lend. Because let's say people take the money out and put it in T-bills, or they take it to money funds. We may not have as much to lend. And we don't want the bank examiners coming all over us and saying, how could you be so cavalier when the bank examiners themselves were cavalier out west and are all gonna be in trouble.

Carl Quintanilla (2:01)

Oh man, this journal piece about the auditors, KPMG for example, on SVB just a couple weeks before the collapse, pointing out some things, but not the things.

Jim Cramer (2:11)

No, so I think that the things are, we have these stressful banks, we have the banks that are stressed. But how about if you're just a major regional bank and they'll come in and say listen guys, we have to be sure that if you had to do hold the maturity issues that you won't be Silicon Valley Bank. So you would halt, now you want to continue to loan, but you also say I don't want to be the next bank that's sanctioned because then the money will just flow right out of mine. So I want to know the cadence of the employment number because if it was good, good, good, and then whew, in the last two weeks, that should affect the thinking.

But it also makes me think, what was Loretta Mester looking at? What was Bullard looking at? James Bullard looking at when they were as if the mini crisis isn't happening. You surely don't want key people in the Federal Reserve to not acknowledge that there's 100, this Bloomberg piece is 105 billion in the last two weeks. Commercial bank deposits fell by 64 billion. Well, that's clearly a case of like, well, we don't want to keep all our money with one bank. So I worry more about that and I know that it's not the Jamie Dimon interview again. I'm not saying it's 2007, 2008

I am saying, could you really keep raising in an atmosphere where you see such a decline in lending?

Carl Quintanilla (3:34)

Yeah, to Jim's point, he mentions Jamie Dimon talking to CNN. If there are more bank failures, he says, honestly, they'll be resolved and it'll be the last of them. I think we're getting near the end of this particular crisis.

I guess, to your point about the lending data, the biggest drop on record those last two weeks in March, and that is fresher data than the jobs number was. The survey week was the week of the 10th.

Jim Cramer (3:59)

I think a lot of people who are used to, say, an Adobe accounting of how you did that day or a Salesforce accounting of how you did midday or an AI of how you did it minute to minute would be saying, would these people be saying, would they be as, let's say, as pro-war or rate hikes when the numbers clearly show you that you gotta pause.