Markets and U.S.-U.K. Trade, Trump: "Powell Is a Fool," Arm Shares Slump 5/8/25

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Jim Cramer (0:45)

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

Carl Quintanilla (0:59)

Good Thursday 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. Bulls take another shot at that April 2 close as the president touts a free trade framework with the UK, although some reports suggested may be limited in scope. Bank of England cuts 25 tons of consumer earnings on the tape with Shopify, Warner, Tapestry and others. Our roadmap begins with the president said to announce what he's calling a full and comprehensive trade agreement with the UK. For its part, the UK does call it a framework. President said to make comments from the Oval in about an hour.

David Faber (1:34)

Also, this morning, President Trump is ramping up his criticism of Jerome Powell, calling him a fool one day after the Fed held steady, of course, on interest rates. Keeping in mind shares of Arm Holdings, they are down somewhat sharply, despite what at least were results that were better than many had anticipated. Maybe the guidance, of course, is below, hard to really deliver at this point that is sending the stock lower. Company CEO Rene Haas is going to join us. That will be in the next hour.

Carl Quintanilla (2:03)

Let's get right to the markets this morning, a day after the Fed did hold rates steady and investors look ahead to this trade announcement from the president in the next hour. We are getting some reports that the 10% will remain in place and we should remind viewers that the UK was not subject to reciprocal, which is really the locus of a lot of investor attention.

Mike Santoli (2:20)

Yeah, not the linchpin potential deal that the market's fixated on, but I think the market response does give you some information about how we are positioned and what we're responsive to, which is incremental gestures in the direction of de-escalation, the administration looking for a win, looking for a way out of maximum tariff regression. And for now, at this level, when we're still trying to figure out if we belong at that April 2nd threshold or above, it's enough, at least as an opening gambit, because the real economy has not buckled yet in the hard data. So we're again in this in-between zone. You have to check every gauge to figure out if everything is fine. And I think it's also why the market was able to absorb the Fed yesterday and Powell really asserting a hard wait and see stance, flagging stagflationary risk, but not really committing that he believes one is more likely to another and not being proactive about it. And then we get weekly jobless claims this morning and they're completely tame. And they seem to be using the labor market as the thing to determine whether, in fact, we get enough weakness. We haven't yet. Last week's high in the S&P is 5,700. The April 2nd closes 5,670. We first reached today's level last July, so every time somebody looks and says, why are we rallying on a deal that might not be a deal, it's just kind of body language.

And so far, things haven't really fallen apart in the Grand Thesis. As at the same time, professional investors, as I keep saying, have not been all in on this rebound rally and maybe feel like a little bit itchy to make sure they have enough exposure.

David Faber (3:57)

As important perhaps, or well, it's unclear in terms of this UK framework or something, I think it's easy to argue that the suspension of this diffusion rule when it comes to semiconductor chip sales to many of our allies, remember, at the end of the Biden administration, and Jim has been talking about this endlessly, were prevented, essentially, from receiving chips from the likes of an NVIDIA. And that certainly seems to be letting a positive tone. Now we don't know what is going to replace it, but the fact that it is not going to be in effect is certainly seems a positive.