SOTS 2nd Hour: Fed Decision Day, “Too Late” Powell, & Israel-Iran Latest 6/18/25

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Sara Eisen (1:02)

Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber, live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks building toward the highs of the morning here in the early trading action. The S&P 500 up three tenths of a percent. Consumer discretionary stocks are actually leading this morning. Three sectors lower and they're all defensive. Health care, real estate and utilities. Everybody else is higher. And so we are now firmly up for the week. The NASDAQ outperforming for the week and for today. It's up about a quarter of one percent right now. Treasuries ahead of the Fed. Take a look. Got some better jobless claims numbers today. The 10 year yield is a little bit lower. Four point three six right now. The two year yield, that's the one that's rate sensitive toward the Fed. It is just below four percent. So there's buying today. We are counting you down to the latest interest rate decision and Fed Chair Powell's conference, his news conference. We are going to get you ready with Evercore Krishna Guha and former Fed Vice Chair Alan Blinder. Also President Trump, just speaking about the Fed Chair, what he'd like to see moments ago. Have a look.

Donald Trump (2:07)

I don't know why that is, but I guess maybe he was a Democrat. You know, I got great advice from Mnuchin on this one. Great advice. But he's done a poor job. So we have no inflation. We have only success. And I'd like to see interest rates get down. Now, Biden did a lot of very short-term debt. So we have short-term debt coming to him. And because of this guy's rates, you know, if he'd lowered a point, I'd pay about a point less. Then if he'd lower two points, I'd pay about two points less. And that's for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years, five years. It's hundreds of billions. It's even trillions of dollars that we're going to lose because of this too late. I call him too late Powell because he's always too late. I mean, if you look at him, every time I did this, I was right 100 percent.

SPEAKER_5 (2:56)

He was wrong.

Donald Trump (2:58)

Maybe I should go to the Fed. Am I allowed to appoint myself, Doug? I don't know. Am I allowed to appoint myself at the Fed? I do a much better job than these people. So anyway, we should be two points lower. It'd be nice to be two and a half points lower. We'd be saving $800 billion, $700 billion. That's a lot of money.

Thank you for nothing, for absolutely nothing. We'd save six, seven, $800 billion. We have, I think, we're 38th now in interest, and we should be number one. We should be the lowest. But, and by the way, if he's worried about inflation, that's okay. I understand that. I don't think there's going to be any. So far, there hasn't. I mean, we have almost no inflation. We've done a great job. We had, when I came in, we had a lot of inflation. We went through four years of the highest inflation in the history of our country with Sleepy Joe Biden. And Sleepy Joe. And he didn't know what the hell he was doing. And so we had the highest inflation we've ever had in the history of our country. And then it came down because when I got elected, it started dropping because people understood that I knew what I was doing. But now we have a man that just refuses to lower the feds. Just refuses to do it. And he's not a smart person. I don't even think he's that political. I think he hates me, but that's okay. You know, he should. He should. I call him every name in the book, trying to get him to do something. I've been nice to him. I do it always. I don't know how to sell. I've been so nice to him, fellas, you wouldn't believe. Let's have dinner. Too late. I'd call him too late. Come on, too late. Let's have dinner. I do it every way in the book. I'm nasty. I'm nice. Nothing works. He's like just a stupid person.