SOTS 2nd Hour: Iran Latest w/Trump's Former NSA Director, the Volatility Playbook, & LIVE: President Trump's Cabinet Meeting 3/26/26

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Sara Eisen (0:58)

Good Thursday morning again. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Mike Santoli. We are live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David and Carl are out today. Ahead this hour, former Trump National Security Advisor HR. McMaster with us, as President Trump warns Iranian negotiators this morning to quote, get serious soon before it's too late. Plus, we'll talk to AI expert Jack Hittery about OpenAI's decision to ditch Sora out of a potential IPO, and market expert Dan Greenhaus tells us the one factor he says is saving the market from a much more dramatic sell-off over this war in Iran. But, Mike, I thought we'd start out by just sharing some ways that the war is impacting the corporate space, companies are feeling it, but it's not necessarily across the board. One industry that certainly is in the crosshairs is the shipping industry. So Hapag Lloyd, which is a global container shipping company, CEO and earnings overnight. The conflict in the Middle East is now causing considerable network disruptions and sharply increasing operational costs. I mean, no surprise that for a global shipper that that would be the impact. And then just on a related note here in the US, the Postal Service is imposing its first ever fuel surcharge on packages, which does raise the price as we try to figure out, especially on days like today, oil prices up. How much inflation are we really looking at in the US economy and how temporary is it going to be? And that's just the day to day trend.

Mike Santoli (2:23)

Yeah, and what kind of inflation is it just going to kind of be dissipated throughout the system? Is it going to get to consumers? Yeah, I mean, that's obviously the big question.

Sara Eisen (2:30)

I mean, today's a day where treasury yields are up and earlier, the chances of rate hikes were kind of up sharply.

Mike Santoli (2:36)

They are up. Yeah. I mean, there's no way you can't feel the sort of stagflationary winds, not that we're there, but that it pushes in that direction. It's interesting the way that, yeah, the bond yields, you know, had a little bit of relief yesterday. We're back up. They do really track oil, even though as much as everybody says, that should not dictate what your outlook is for sustainable inflation or what the Fed should do. This mechanically yields tend to track what oil is doing. And we have oil up 3% today. It's not a big deal. It's not making new highs. $90 WTI seems to be the pivot where it sort of, you know, you can be more comfortable below and less comfortable above if you're an equity investor. But everybody recognizes nobody knows what the current setup is.

Sara Eisen (3:18)

And it could be temporary, even the USPS fuel charge is an 8% price increase on package shipping services, but it's temporary, right? The only other, we talked a little bit about housing, which tees off of these higher, housing stocks have actually been not performing well on rising rates, rising mortgage rates. KB Home CEO this week said we saw pretty good sales results for the first week of March, but the last couple of weeks have been a little softer than what we would like to see or what we would normally get this time of year. And we just don't have a lot of visibility right now. I don't think anybody knows how long this conflict may go on and how it's going to impact consumer psyche and confidence, but we feel that right now it is weighing on the consumer.