Metals Rebound, SoftBank's $40B Bet on OpenAI, Meta's AI Acquisition 12/30/25

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David Faber (0:59)

Good Tuesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber with Sara Eisen. We're live from Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange. Jim and Carl both have the morning off and the week off. Take a look at futures, of course, as you get ready for trading 30 minutes from now. I don't know, what do you call that, Sara? I don't know what you call that.

Yeah, unch, all right, I'll go with that, unch. But we got a lot of exciting news for you. In fact, our roadmap begins with tech pressure threatening the so-called Santa Claus rally. The S&P is coming off back to back losses. This is investors turn the focus to Fed Minutes later today.

Sara Eisen (1:32)

Plus the metals trade, we're watching it. Miners, New Mom and Freeport among the top S&P pre-market performers here. Gold and Silver are seeing the best year since 1979 And Meta acquiring Singapore-based AI startup Manus in a deal reportedly worth more than $2 billion. But it could signal for the AI trends into the new year.

David Faber (1:52)

Start with the markets, of course, after what was a pullback yesterday, and not to mention, of course, some very exciting trading in some of the metals. Silver certainly plunging yesterday, still up enormously even for the month, and of course, coming back a bit this morning as well, Sara.

Sara Eisen (2:08)

Yeah, I mean, yesterday was crazy. It dropped 9 percent, biggest one-day decline since February 2021 after the CME raised margin requirements. But interestingly, a lot of people were pointing out that the Silver ETF didn't see as sharp declines as the underlying commodity, maybe a signal that retail was buying on the dip. And now we're seeing a rebound to the tune of 8 percent today. So, I don't know, is Silver in a bubble? That's what people are wondering. It's unclear that it's having any major ripple effects into other markets like the stock market beyond boosting some of the miners and hitting some of the miners yesterday. But overall, you do wonder why there is this mad dash into Silver lately.

David Faber (2:47)

Yeah, well, you're in a better position to potentially answer that question than I am. This is something you certainly focus on, currencies and or some of these metals in terms of, we talked about the debasement of the currency yesterday.

Sara Eisen (2:59)

It's been a big story this year, dollar down 10 percent. It's having its worst year in several years. That's definitely part of it. But in December alone, I think Silver has climbed more than 20 percent. So seemingly out of nowhere. The one difference with gold, which is also having a tremendous year, and as part of that debasement trade is that Silver is useful.

It's an industrial metal and it's used in industrial production, which is why it has even caught the attention of Elon Musk. Look, there's a lot going on here when it comes to the precious metals. What's interesting to me is that Bitcoin has not been playing into the rally with precious metals. If that's considered also a debasement, an alternative to a fiat currency, it's not really acting that way and that it's broadening here. We're starting to see it in copper. We're starting to see it in platinum as well. There's a lot of cross currents. The other thing that happened overnight, David, is that the Chinese yuan strengthened past seven to the dollar for the first time in two years. What's the significance of that? It's just more weak dollar and stronger Chinese currency, which is just, you know, all sorts of ramifications of that. But I think one of the surprises this year has been the strength of China's markets, even with all the tariffs.