SOTS 2nd Hour: Kraft Heinz CEO, The Walmart Trade, & U.S.-Iran Tensions Rise 2/19/26

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Sara Eisen (1:05)

Good Thursday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Coming up this hour, oil prices rising as tensions escalate between the US and Iran. Richard Haass from the Council on Foreign Relations will be with us to discuss what could happen next. Plus an exclusive interview with the CEO of Kraft Heinz, Steve K. Helene, as the company presents at the Consumer Analyst Group Conference, Cagney. Following news, it's pausing its efforts to split.

Carl Quintanilla (1:35)

Busy data calendar today and getting a little busier. Let's get to Rick Santelli. Hey, Rick.

Rick Santelli (1:40)

Good morning, Carl. Yes, leading economic indicators for December, minus two-tenths, exactly as expected. And that would make this the 13th consecutive month without a positive number. We've had a couple of zeros, but the last positive number was November of 24 Dollar index on pace for a fourth higher close, and it looks like it might be near a one-month high. Should it close here? Interest rates? Well, it's kind of a mixed bag. We're seeing virtually unchanged on the short end, slightly higher on the long end. And for pending home sales for the month of January, let's head east to Diana Olick. Diana?

Diana Olick (2:21)

Rick, pending home sales in January dropped 0.8% compared with December, and were down 0.4% from January of last year. Now, that's a miss. The street was expecting a nearly 2% gain. This count is based on signed contracts during the month. So that's people out shopping when the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage dropped a bit mid-month, and then came back to where it started. So not a huge change. That said, rates in January were significantly lower than they were a year ago, and that did nothing to juice sales. The bigger impact in January may have been severe winter weather toward the end of the month. And if you look regionally, month to month, we did see declines in the Northeast and South where that weather impacted most and gains in the Midwest and West. The Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun noted in the release that lower rates today mean about five and a half million borrowers would qualify today for a mortgage that they wouldn't have qualified for a year ago at those higher rates. We are not, however, seeing that show up in mortgage demand from buyers. Sara?

Sara Eisen (3:18)

Okay, Diana, thank you very much. Another data point today that was out that I wanted to focus on is the jobless claims number comes out every week, but this was some good news. Fewer Americans than expected, and certainly than last week, filing for unemployment claims. We got a number that was 206,000 for the week, and that was down from the previous week when claims were up. We always watch when claims are up. Is that the start of a trend? Well, this looks like good news that they've come back down, because the prior week was 229,000, and that suggests that maybe that weather had to do with it. You know, the cold winter weather kind of kept people out of the business in terms of getting jobs. That's good. You know, we continue to have this debate, low firings, which we got in the jobless claims, good news, but also low hirings, which has been bad news. And what is that reflective of?

What is that telling us? Is it telling us that businesses are more cautious? Or is it just a reflection of immigration and the fact that we've cut back on undocumented immigrants in a really big way by hundreds of thousands in the last year? San Francisco Fed had a really interesting paper that I just wanted to highlight that was out this week. They looked by geography and by industry, and they found nearly one for one casual effect of unauthorized immigration worker flows on employment growth. US employment growth is likely to face continued downward pressure as long as the ongoing declines in unauthorized immigrant worker flows continues. In other words, they found that it was basically the fact that we're not seeing as much hiring was all a function of the fact that we don't see as many people.