Market Sell-Off: Oil Spikes, Jobs Go Negative, NEC Director Hassett, Robinhood CEO 3/6/26

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Carl Quintanilla (1:00)

Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Faber has the morning off. Stocks look to open near the lows for the week as February jobs does come in with a surprise drop. 92K, worse than over five years. The warming time intensifies. Oil goes to 87 for the first time in almost two years. Our roadmap begins with the jobs number, that big miss, as oil and gas prices do continue to surge on Mideast tensions. We will talk about it all with NEC Director Kevin Hassett. Anthropics' Jerry Omote apologizes for that leaked memo, but adds that the AI startup sees no choice but to challenge the Pentagon's supply chain risk designation in court. And Robinhood's Vlad Tenev is going to join us here at Post 9 We will talk about this company's platinum card as well as its Ventures Fund set to debut here at the Big Board today. Let's begin with a lot for the markets to digest this morning, from surging oil and gas prices to this weaker than expected jobs number, Jim. There was a strike in there. That's maybe 30,000 workers.

Jim Cramer (2:00)

Yeah, but the areas where there's no growth are areas that there had been growth. And I've got to tell you that I don't want to see... There's been so many people laid off from the federal government, which is fine, but where are they? And I have to tell you, when I saw employment information to trend down, 11,000, okay, that has to be AI. Enough, enough.

We sit here and listen to all these companies, Carl, and they're saying that they can take call centers, they can make sure that the people who are third and fourth year, they don't need to be the... Here it is. It's the beginning.

Carl Quintanilla (2:34)

You mean of AI productivity. It's the beginning. You're done asking questions.

Jim Cramer (2:37)

Yeah, I just said, okay, that's it. People don't want to hire and they're letting people go.

They are doing some firing. And I think we just have to accept the fact that the information component of the Labor Department is what they ought to be investigating, but that's where I see it. It's just happening. Transportation and warehousing. That's robot. They're starting to use robot. And we just, we have to start recognizing, maybe we can do it at the GTC conference for Jensen Wong, which is a week from now, that there really is, it's happening. And stop saying when's it going to happen. This is a happening. And I know that we'll speak to Kevin Hassett.

No one wants to admit it because it's secular. It's not secular, it's secular. But I think that when you list time and again to these executives, come on, Open AI, it's happening. And this is the agentic economy. And everyone just said, listen, one day we're going to use agents. That is here. Right. Right now.

Carl Quintanilla (3:32)

I mean, the general thinking has been as companies start to discover what you're describing, that as they hiring plans for next year get closer and closer, that we're going to see more of it.

Jim Cramer (3:42)

Well, I just keep hearing from people in the industry, if you're in your, there's a, there's just a palpable gloom among people who have been out of college three to seven years, that they went into the wrong profession or they went somewhere where they thought they could be coding one day and they don't get the job and then they get laid off anyway if they do get it somewhere. Look, it's happening, Carl, and I think that we, anybody who's denying it now is denying the facts. These numbers are too convincing.