SOTS 2nd Hour: Navigating the Homebuilders, Tiktok Deal Latest, & LIVE: Accenture CEO 9/25/25

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Carl Quintanilla (1:07)

Good Thursday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange, along with Sara Eisen. Joining us today from Miami, we'll find out why in a minute, ahead of this campus interview next hour with Citadel's Ken Griffin. Coming up this hour, the CEO of $150 billion consulting firm Accenture joins us on the back of earnings. We'll talk AI, immigration, shares are lowered today. Company is one of the largest petitioners of H1B visas in the country as well. Shares of Starbucks under some pressure, Brian Nicol announcing store closures in this billion-dollar restructuring. Get some details on that strategy shift in a minute. But Sara, how are things in Miami?

Sara Eisen (1:46)

Things are great. I'm here at the Florida International University, where there's a big announcement coming up this hour with Ken Griffin and even Moskowitz, who's the head of Success Academy, which is the biggest charter school in New York. They are bringing it to Miami. Ken Griffin is announcing a $50 million contribution to Success Academy on top of the millions he has already given. So we're going to talk about that. It's right in the crosshairs of the New York City mayoral election. There are politics here to discuss as well, and just the broken education system in America. But guys, I wanted to start the hour how we always do, reflecting on the economy, because we got two surprisingly, I would say surprisingly strong numbers on the health of the economy this morning. Jobless Claims, Thursday. This is the most real time update about what businesses are doing and whether they're firing workers. We're constantly obsessing about the health of the labor market. Guess what? A really good number here. 218, they actually fell. That was less than consensus. So we're kind of working through what happened in Texas a few weeks ago, which saw that sharp rise, as you can see near the end of the chart, in the Americans filing for jobless claims. That looks like an anomaly and we are headed down. So that's a good sign, Carl and David, when you're looking for what businesses are doing with workers, they may not be hiring as much as they were, but they're not firing. That continues to be a trend, Carl. Even continuing claims, those who are continually requesting jobless claims because they can't find a job, that actually came down as well and that's been an elevated number.

Carl Quintanilla (3:23)

Continuing claims, lowest since May. I was looking yesterday at Goldman's forecast for payrolls. I mean, they basically are arguing we're bottoming right now, and we're going to get back above 50, back above 100, I think, by April if I'm not mistaken.

Sara Eisen (3:39)

So that's the key. Our business is going to be hiring. We have fewer numbers because of immigration. There are constantly questions about businesses implementing AI. I know we're going to talk to the Accenture CEO about that and whether they can do more with less on the productivity front and whether that's going to impact the jobs numbers. But you're right. I mean, hopefully, there's not a government shutdown because we need to know what the jobs numbers are going to look like in order to process what the Fed is going to do, what the market is going to do. The jobs numbers and the CPI report are going to be key, hoping that we don't have a government shutdown. The other big report of the day, which was GDP. So this is a look at the second quarter. So it is backward-looking. But it tells us a little bit about momentum. And it was also better than expected. 3.8%.