SOTS 2nd Hour: 2025's Charts of the Year, Tech/Retail Playbooks, & AI Headlines to Know 12/30/25

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What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure.

Julia Boorstin (0:36)

Trailblazing women changing the game.

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One of my favorite pieces of advice, think about what your boss's boss needs.

Kate Rogers (0:44)

Leadership can look in many, many different forms. It really does come down to just trusting yourself.

Julia Boorstin (0:48)

Life is short and you just gotta think big to accomplish big things. Julia Borsten hosts CNBC Changemakers and Power Players. New episodes every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts.

Sara Eisen (1:00)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen here with David Faber. We are live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Quintanilla has the week off. It's the second to last trading day of the year. And after solid gains in 2025, one market expert says there are three reasons to remain bullish. That's coming up in a moment. Plus Meta making a deeper push into AI agents with an acquisition reportedly worth billions. But will it move the needle in the AI horse race in 2026? And China reportedly cracking down on foreign shipmakers requiring firms to rely more on domestic suppliers. We'll talk to an analyst who says the rule could change the impact to NVIDIA in the country. But first, David, you know, we always start with the big macro stories.

David Faber (1:42)

Yes, we do, Sara.

Sara Eisen (1:43)

And since it's a little light.

David Faber (1:44)

It's a favorite part of my day.

Sara Eisen (1:45)

This morning, we're gonna do the big macro charts that defined 2025 today and tomorrow. So here's three that I think really tell the story of what happened in the economy. The first one, it's tariff revenues. You know, April 2nd, Liberation Day. Some of it was walked back, but you know what? A lot of tariffs went into place. If you take this chart back a few years, there was barely any tariff revenue collected. In the last few months, I mean, we're talking about versus $30 billion a month collected. So we're up almost $200 billion in tariff revenues. What's gonna happen with that money? The president has floated all sorts of things, like giving it to Americans and checks, getting rid of the income tax. It's clearly not gonna do that.

David Faber (2:27)

Military $1,776.

Sara Eisen (2:29)

But it is money coming into the US coffers that was not doing that. And also, there's some uncertainty around this money in the Supreme Court decision. What happens with the reciprocal tariffs, IEPA tariffs? We're expecting a decision there.

If the court finds it unconstitutional or illegal that the president went through with this, I think the question is how fast they could get other structures up and running. Because what we've heard from the administration is tariffs are here to stay. And I think another question is, you know, if we get a Democratic administration coming next, do they continue to rely? I mean, it's a lot of money now coming in.

David Faber (3:03)

It's a lot of money, and it helps certainly for the deficit. That said, a year ago, and certainly for months following this period of time last year, we talked about who's going to pay it. And the drag it would have in the economy and the inflationary impact. And here we are. And so my question to you is who did end up paying this? Where did all this money come from?

Sara Eisen (3:22)

Three places. It was a sort of a third, a third, a third, is what the best estimate of economists are. Some of it, born by the consumers, but definitely not the kind of inflationary spike that was initially expected. And remember, people were talking about recession when this was announced. And that's not happening. So some of it born by consumers, you do see that in places like video games, some of the electronics, where we just don't make that stuff here, and the manufacturer has to pass it on. But some of it, you know, born by the companies themselves, and they're able to offset that maybe with, I don't know, AI productivity gains. And that's why we haven't seen a bigger hit to margins. But I follow the retailers, David. They talk about the billions of dollars that are, you know, eating in from tariffs.