Pershing Square’s Bill Ackman, CFTC Chairman, Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt 5/4/26

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**Carl Quintanilla** (1:00)
Good Monday morning. Welcome to Money Movers. I'm Carl Quintanilla, live at Post 9 to the New York Stock Exchange. Sarah Eisen live in Beverly Hills today at Milken, where she has quite the lineup of big interviews coming up this hour. She'll be joined by the chair of the CFTC, Michael Selig, Pershing Square founder and CEO Bill Ackman, and Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt. Plus, traders watching closely these developments out of the Middle East as the president pushes to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Prompting some fresh warnings from Iran. We will dig into the state of the AI race with some exclusive comments from open AI chair, Salesforce co-founder Brett Taylor this hour. As for markets, trying to build a little bit here on Friday's all-time highs. S&P is up about three points, both energy and tech and utilities doing some work. Bonds are definitely getting watched with the 10-year above 4-4 and the long bond right at five. Let's begin though with the latest in Iran and the president's plan to free these ships in the strait. Meghan Casella is outside the White House. Morning, Meghan.

**Meghan Casella** (2:00)
Carl, good morning. The president's calling this one Project Freedom. He posted on social media Sunday evening saying, for the good of Iran, the Middle East and the United States, we have told what he described as neutral and innocent countries that we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways so that they can freely and ably get on with their business. He went on to say in that post that if in any way this humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will unfortunately have to be dealt with forcefully. But since then, Carl, it has been remarkably unclear whether traffic has moved through the strait or what it has looked like. To recap, first overnight, Iran's Fars News Agency reported that two missiles hit a US warship trying to pass through the strait and that the warship was then turned back. US Central Command then pushed back on that, saying that no US Navy ships had been struck. CENTCOM later said that two US flag merchant vessels have successfully transited through the Strait of Hormuz and are safely headed on their journey. Only for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps to respond to that, saying that no commercial vessels or oil tankers had passed through the strait in recent hours and that the American claims were baseless. So we are working right now to try to track what ships, if any, may have passed the strait in recent hours. But in the meantime, what appears clear for now is that Iran will not willingly, at least, be letting the US guide ships through the strait. And the ceasefire, based on these reports, might be holding on land, but maybe not on water, and Carl, if that's the case, then Trump's threat of responding forcefully to any interference remains alive and well, hanging out there in the balance. Carl.

**Carl Quintanilla** (3:29)
Megan, we'll talk in a bit as well about China's role in all of this ahead of that summit. That's our Megan Casella outside the White House. For more on the impact to the market, let's bring in our Senior Markets Commentator, Mike Santoli, has been working a long morning on Squawk, worked your way through eBay and GameStop. But Mike, this overall narrative about the market being resilient up five percent since the war began.

**Mike Santoli** (3:50)
Yeah, there's no doubt the overall market has been resilient, Carl. One of the reasons for that is the way we measure what the market's doing is the S&P 500, which is just about half levered to the AI theme. I think once we got through the earnings reports last week of the big spenders along this front, it seemed to give investors a three-month window where we don't have to worry in too profound a way about the durability of that piece of the demand. Then when there's uncertainty in things like transports today, you got a news-driven decline there, you have consumer cyclicals still really lagging in a profound way versus the rest of the market because of the oil price effect on real disposable incomes, certainty gets a premium and the certainty is in the memory stocks and all the rest. I don't know how far exactly we can use those themes to insulate us from the rest. It's working so far, the market's rotating in that very benign way that we've gotten used to in past years where not that many stocks are going up, but on a given day, it grinds a little bit higher. So that's where we are. We'll point out one other little pattern here. We've had three Fridays in a row where the S&P printed a very aggressive intraday high, came off it a little bit, and then spent most of the remaining week just kind of underneath that high and just consolidating a little bit. So we'll see if that continues from here. I don't think people are as under-invested or as negative on the market as they were a few weeks ago. So we'll see, you have to watch sentiment getting a little bit frothy as well.