SOTS 2nd Hour: June CPI Breakdown, LIVE: Energy Sec. Talks AI, & Mario Gabelli’s Stock Picks 7/15/25

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Sara Eisen (0:47)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen. With Carl Quintanilla, David Faber is off today. We are live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks are a little bit higher on the S&P 500 We lost some early morning gains up a 10th still. A little more than that of a percent. The NASDAQ is outperforming, so tech is leading. We're up 6 tenths of a percent on that. And the Dow down 137 or so points. So you can see it's kind of a mixed picture when it comes to sector performance. Tech obviously out ahead. As for Treasuries, reaction to CPI, which comes in in line but shows some hotness beneath the secret, beneath the surface. There's the 10-year yield. It's a little firmer.

4.449 actually yields higher across the board. So some selling. Technology is the only sector, by the way, that is higher right now. Everybody else is lower. Materials and financials at the bottom of the pack. We've got a lot coming your way this hour. In just a moment, Gamco chairman and CEO Mario Gabelli joins us here on set with his latest thoughts on the market, the M&A landscape and his top investment ideas right now. Plus, President Trump attending Pennsylvania's Energy and Innovation Summit today, where billions of dollars in deals could also be announced. We'll take you there live for an interview with the Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, this hour. But first, we're 30 minutes into the trading session. Here are three big movers we're watching. NVIDIA says it will resume sales of its advanced H20 AI chip to China. Following assurances from the Trump administration, it will be granted licenses to do so soon. AMD also hired after a report said it plans to resume shipments to China as well.

MP Materials is jumping after a $500 million investment from Apple. MP will supply rare earth magnets and the companies will partner on a rare earth recycling facility. Stock getting a 17% boost there on that. And then Google is investing $25 billion into data centers and AI infrastructure tied to the nation's biggest electric grid. Plus CoreWeave announcing separate plans to invest $6 billion into an AI center in Pennsylvania. CoreWeave CEO will join Closing Bell Overtime to talk about it today at 4 p.m. Eastern time. But Carl, let's start with the big news, which is inflation. Because there's a lot of mystery with inflation these days. Are the tariffs actually leading to inflation? Looking at the overall headline number, I mean, it's a little, it was 0.3%. That was pretty much in line. The year over year number did move up from, for instance, the month before. So we got year over year inflation of 2.7% in June from a year earlier. It's nothing terrifying or alarming. It's higher than May's increase of 2.4%. We're showing you here where the biggest gainers and a lot of it was in the oil and electricity and gasoline space. We had some hot temperatures. We had rising oil prices. That was a big part of the story. And then on the flip side, used cars and trucks actually saw deflation. Got a negative number there. New vehicles were also lower. That was somewhat of a surprise given the tariffs. But if you're looking for signs that the tariffs are leading to higher consumer prices, you did see that. And that's what I wanted to highlight here. The tariffs are having an impact. Look at some of the areas where we're starting to see higher prices being paid for the consumer. There are places where we import a lot of the production. Men's shirts and sweaters saw a 4.3% increase over the month. Women's dresses saw an almost 4% increase. Appliances, toys. So there's definitely evidence that the tariffs are having an impact in raising consumer prices. It's just not happening as much on the overall CPI level.

Carl Quintanilla (4:16)

Yep. I think it's Joe Brusuelas this morning. You can see the outlines of tariff-induced inflation that will become more prominent in the July to October period. The thing is that services are sort of offsetting a lot of that. There's a sense that the net-net result might not be inflation.