SOTS 2nd Hour: CPI Market Takeaways w/Moody's Chief Economist, All Eyes On Beijing, & Game Over For GME's Ryan Cohen? 5/12/26

Jennifer Garner (0:00)

Hi, I'm Jennifer Garner. Being a business owner takes hard work and a whole lot of miles. So Once Upon a Farm needed a serious business card. We chose the Capital One Venture X Business Card. With unlimited double miles on every purchase, we earn rewards on all the things we need to grow our business.

Venture X Business gives us big purchasing power so we can spend more and earn more. We redeemed miles to travel the country and partner with new stores. Capital One, what's in your wallet?

SPEAKER_2 (0:28)

TermSupply, see capitalone.com for details.

SPEAKER_3 (0:30)

Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. They're for those all-night study sessions. The moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet's taken. The times you're deep in your flow and can't be interrupted by an auto update. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to you. Built with long lasting battery so you're not scrambling for an outlet. And built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. Find technology built for the way you work at dell.com/dellpcs.

Built for you.

Carl Quintanilla (1:06)

Good Tuesday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber. Seema Mody is here, a host tonight at the New York Stock Exchange. Sara Eisen is off today. Coming up this hour, Apple and Nvidia, both hitting record highs in the last week. But only one of those company CEOs is heading to China with President. We'll talk about why tech might be a big focus of this high stakes trip. Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi is with us. He's gonna break down what he calls a worrisome inflation print on CPI today. And Zoominfo and GetLab, the latest software names to see some big swings on earnings. We'll take a look at why the sector is seeing so much volatility lately.

David Faber (1:39)

Let's start with the market, of course. The NASDAQ is pulling back after what's been a furious rally. We've seen record highs, of course, and we've made some comparisons to the.com bubble of the late 1990s. CNBC's senior markets commentator Mike Santoli is here at Post9.

Mike, I don't know, what do you make of the action? I guess where to start.

Michael Santoli (1:59)

Well, I mean, first of all, I think it does make sense that we're at least making the, going through the exercise of saying, does this look like something that was super euphoric, speculative momentum that ended in a bad place? Some technical extremes require that debate, I think.

One is how crazily overbought and dominant semis are. You have to go back to 2000 and before that, 1995 for a further extreme. And then just the absolute way that the new era thinking and tech stocks are stealing all the oxygen from the rest of the market. And if you squint and say you have stocks up volatility, firm or higher yields up, it has this kind of very kinetic high metabolism look of a possible overheat in capex that we saw back then too. But we're nowhere near it, right? In terms of the magnitude and velocity of the surge in the NASDAQ, I always keep pointing this out from the 98 low to the March 2000 high, 18 months it tripled, it more than tripled. So here we've had a NASDAQ in the last three years that's doubled, right? So twice as long, one third the gain. Obviously people talk to it's earnings driven, it's not as much just pure air. We had 500 plus IPOs in 1999, the average one day pop was 70%.

We're not seeing that now, we have different issues. But just because we're not there doesn't mean we'll ever get there. And it doesn't mean that there's not risk in this market now being created by hyper concentration and too much enthusiasm around one theme. Because if I say it's not like the peak in 2000, all I'm saying is the NASDAQ's not going down 75% and we're not going to have a lost decade in stocks. That's not exactly the strongest statement.

David Faber (3:37)

But I could also hear you saying, oh, we've got a lot more to go here. And in fact, if this is the technology, seismic technology change that we think it is, much more so than the internet, maybe I got another year and a half ahead of me. And that's gonna go up a heck of a lot more.

Michael Santoli (3:52)

No, that's exactly what the bulls are saying. I was actually struck by a B of A note yesterday from the tech trading desk that said, look, the companies right now that are doing the heaviest investing in AI are the ones that were the free riders on the build out of the internet in 90s and 2000s, right? It's Microsoft, it's Google, et cetera.