SOTS 2nd Hour: Dow Hits New Record High, Sam Altman Touts ChatGPT Reacceleration, “Bash All Day, Buy All Night” 2/9/26

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Sara Eisen (1:04)

Good Monday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live, as always, at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Coming up, the Dow hitting a record high Friday. After a week of turbulent trading for the major averages, we'll talk to Citigroup's Scott Cronert about where he sees equities heading from here. Plus, Bitcoin under more pressure this morning, still sitting below $70,000. Former Barclay CEO turned crypto company executive, Bob Diamond, will be here to discuss. And foreign money flowing into the United States like never before.

According to Rockefeller's Ruchir Sharma, why he says investors overseas are bashing the US all day and buying all night. But guys, this is a very big important week for the economy. We're going to get a lot of key data releases starting tomorrow with retail sales, a read on the consumer where there's a lot of debate about high end, low end, and what's going on with overall spending. Wednesday, very unusual, the Wednesday jobs report, that remember it was delayed because of the government shutdown. So we will get that January jobs. Thursday jobless claims as always, after an elevated read last week on Americans filing for jobless claims. And then the big inflation CPI report on Friday. I wanted to just zero in on jobs for a moment. What we're expecting, 55,000 jobs to be created in January, 4.4% unemployment rate. So kind of stable trends, which overall have been worse lately, you know, just in terms of the amount of job growth. In fact, Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council for President Trump was on with us this morning, and he hinted that it may not be great. Listen.

Kevin Hassett (2:37)

When there's a productivity boom, then maybe you can make the same amount of stuff with fewer workers, since that might reduce labor demand. And then the other thing is that there's a pretty big decline in the labor force because illegals leave the country. And so the break-even job number is quite a bit lower than it was under Joe Biden when there were people, you know, basically coming across the border, willy-nilly. And so I think that you should expect slightly smaller job numbers that are consistent with high GDP growth right now. And one shouldn't panic if you see a sequence of numbers that are lower than you're used to because, again, population growth is going down and productivity growth is skyrocketing. It's an unusual set of circumstances.

Sara Eisen (3:21)

And it is an unusual set of circumstances to have fewer people getting jobs, fewer job growth every month, but also really strong GDP.

I mean, Carl, that has been the trend. If you look at the last few months of payroll growth, you can see it's been a lot lower than it was in the previous years. And one way to look at it, as Hassett says, and a lot of economists are on board with this idea, it's not just spin from the White House. We are seeing a productivity boom. So workers are able to do more with less. It gets to the AI question that we ask every day about jobs. And that, you know, the supply is lower of workers because of the immigration policies. That is an explanation for it.

Carl Quintanilla (3:57)

Yeah, I was looking at the last three months of ADP, obviously, just private, but 74, 3722 And there is a couple calls for a negative print on Wednesday.

Sara Eisen (4:09)

Which would get, which would be a big headline, of course, if we end up losing jobs. And now the president has owned this economy, he told Tom Yamas at NBC that, you know, they're not going to blame Biden anymore on the economy. But it's just, it's unusual because usually it's more of a liability when you don't see job growth, I think, for an administration. But if you're seeing such strong economic growth, you know, in a stock market at record high, it doesn't jibe with the idea that usually job growth slows into recession. We'll see, you know, if it's really just demand for labor has decreased and there's bigger economic problems.