SOTS 2nd Hour: A Media Deep-Dive w/Disney’s CEO & ESPN’s Chairman, Plus Walmart Talks Tariffs 8/21/25

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Sara Eisen (1:02)

Good Thursday morning. Welcome back to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla. We are live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber joins us in just a moment with a big interview. Disney CEO Bob Iger and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro. As ESPN rolls out its new streaming service, that exclusive conversation coming your way in just a few minutes. First up, though, in the markets, we've got some pressure here. S&P down about a half a percent. Only utilities and fairly energy positive right now. Everybody else is lower. So the tech sell-off continues. Nasdaq 100 down six tenths of one percent. Weak to date now, two and a half percent. So we're about three and a half percent off the highs, just to put it in context, as we've seen this reversal out of some of these AI names. No big catalyst, but a lot of people pointing to just valuation, digestion. As for treasuries right now, the story has been actually lower yields, but they popped higher.

The two-year yield, 3.78 percent got some PMI data. That was pretty good on services in the last hour. Jobless claims a little elevated. The tenure yield, 4.33 percent.

Carl Quintanilla (2:06)

Getting some housing data crossing. For that, we're going to turn to Diana Olick. Morning, Diana.

Diana Olick (2:11)

Existing home sales in July rose 2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 4.01 million units. The street was actually looking for a slight decline, so that's a beat month-to-month. Sales up 0.8 percent from July of last year. Now, this count is based on closing, so it's most contracts signed in May and June when mortgage rates were on the decline. There were 1.55 million homes for sale at the end of July. That's up 15.7 percent year over year and represents a 4.6 month supply at the current sales pace. Despite more supply, though, the median price of a home sold in July was $422,400, an increase of just 0.2 percent from July of last year, but a new July high. Now, prices have been up annually for just over two years. This may be a turning point given that very, very slight increase. Now, sales were strongest in the Northeast month to month, weakest in the Midwest, which is a little weird because the Midwest is where homes are cheapest. First time buyers dropped to 28 percent of sales from 30 percent in June. Historically, they make up 40 percent.

Days on market rose both for the month and from last year, and all cash hit 31 percent of transactions up from 27 percent the year before. And the Realtors Chief Economist, Sara noted that is a very unusually high level of all cash sales.

Sara Eisen (3:31)

Okay. Thank you, Diana. Yeah. Market trades. Hi. I'm Diana Olek. Walmart, top story in the consumer world, in the stock market. The numbers missed estimates on the earnings front. The stock is lower right now, but a lot of that miss on earnings was due to one-off factors because sales were actually quite good. Here's the look at US comp sales. Very key. 4.6 percent. So it was a little bit of a step up. It was better than expectations. And Walmart felt so confident about it that they actually raised their sales guidance for the year, raised earnings as well, better foreign exchange issues there. Look, Walmart's dealing with tariffs as all our retailers. The CEO, Doug McMillan, talking about on the call how they're seeing the impact on consumers. Listen.