SOTS 2nd Hour: Chicago Fed President Goolsbee, FedEx's Freight Spinoff, Nike's Turnaround Plan 12/20/24

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Carl Quintanilla (1:04)

Good Friday morning, welcome to another hour of Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber. Courtney Reagan's here with us at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Sarah Eisen has the morning off. S&P 5850ish, a lot to juggle today as we watch this government funding showdown. FedSpeak returns, Triple Witch, some high profile corporate results as we close out this final full week of trading for the year.

Courtney Reagan (1:26)

We've got a lot to pack into this show. We are 30 minutes into the trading session. Here are some big movers that we're watching this morning. Let's watch shares of FedEx. They're off highs. As the company announced, it's much-anticipated spinoff of that freight division. It's going to focus more on its core delivery business. We're going to bring you more on this ahead, but you can see shares slightly higher on that. Shares of Novo Nordisk also tumbling after disappointing results from its experimental obesity drug. Shares that Eli Lilly and other way lost drug companies are rallying, however. And we're watching Nike, the company beating admittedly low expectations. CFO Matthew Friend saying sales would fall double digits in the current quarter. And Nike's new CEO, Elliott Hill, also warning of short-term pain.

We will speak with one analyst who just cut her price target on the stock and see what she has after hearing Mr. Hill on the call for the first time last night.

Carl Quintanilla (2:10)

Let's get some humish with Rick Santelli. Morning, Rick.

Rick Santelli (2:14)

Good morning, Carl. Now these are December final reads, so we'll take mid-month read and toss it. Usually there's not big changes. There are some significant changes here. 74 remains the headline. That was our mid-month read. And it's the strongest reading going back to April. Here's where it changes a bit.

Our last read on current conditions was 77.7. It's now 75.1. It dropped a bit. But it is still the best read going back to April. So we lost a bit, but it's still... Well, consider that all the previous months going back to April were all in the low to mid-60s. So it is a bit of an improvement on a macro vision. If you look at expectations, exactly the opposite. 71.6 mid-month, we popped up to 73.3. And that is the best number, well, just since last month when it was 76.9, and that was the best since March. So they're holding up well. If we look at the inflation, also some surprises. 2.8 on one year, it was 2.9. 2.8 would be the smallest well since November when it was 2.6. So the reason we're not seeing a huge drop in yields, that is lower than expected is because we've kind of been there, done that to a greater degree already this year. Same is true for 5 to 10 We go from 3.01 to 3.0. The low read this year was 2.8. So we are coming down, but not coming down to extremes that we've seen already in 2024 Yields have reversed up off of the early morning PCE numbers where yields had moved down. And the curve? The curve has lost 3 basis points of steepness since the number this morning. David, back to you.

David Faber (4:02)

Thank you, Rick. Rick Santelli. Let's get to Washington DC now. Congressional leaders scrambling to reach a spending deal. This to avoid a government shutdown, which would begin at midnight. This comes, of course, after a number of House Republicans rejected an earlier bipartisan deal. Emily Wilkins is live on Capitol Hill, of course. Emily, you referred to Plan A and Plan B not working. Now they're on Plan C. How's that going so far?

Emily Wilkins (4:27)

Well, we initially heard that there might be a vote this morning, but no one seems to know if that vote is going to happen or what they're voting on. We are at least hearing a couple different ideas for what this next step might look like, though. Speaker Mike Johnson is currently huddling with a number of lawmakers in his office, including some of those who voted no. One thing that I've heard is that Congress is thinking about potentially just doing a short-term stopgap, so something that wouldn't go to March like they initially envisioned, but just cover a couple of weeks. And I think we might have a clip from Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, who was talking about that on Squawk Box this morning.