SOTS 2nd Hour: New Jobs Data, Trump Agenda Latest, & UBS's Healthcare Playbook 1/8/25

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Sara Eisen (0:31)

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Sara Eisen (0:51)

Good Thursday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live at Post 9 as always from the New York Stock Exchange. Today, news out of Washington, moving lots of stocks this morning, from defense to housing. We'll bring you all the latest developments. Plus, Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer will join us on the latest out of Venezuela. He says removing Maduro was the easy part. What comes next could be the real challenge. He'll tell us how he thinks things could play out from here. And Biotech, hitting a record high. We've got a top analyst to lay out where he sees opportunity in the space moving forward.

Carl Quintanilla (1:24)

Busy morning on the data front. A little bit more coming now. Let's get to Rick Santelli. Hey, Rick.

Rick Santelli (1:29)

Yes, good morning, Carl. Our October final read on wholesale inventories for October, of course, is up two-tenths exactly as expected. And we do see that the inventories of late have been on the build. The biggest number, of course, was January. Probably many trying to get in front of tariff issues. But we do see solid build. Now, the key is, are they on the sale block? Are they being sold? So sales for the month of October, expected down a bit, came in down a bit more than expected, at minus four-tenths of a percent, no, nearly down half a percent. And that would be the weakest level, well, equals exactly where we were in May. Find a bigger negative. You're going to January, which was the biggest, the biggest drop in sales at nine-tenths. This would be the second biggest. But if you look at all the other data points today, seriously solid, positive economic news, less announced layoffs on Challenger, unit labor costs dropped, productivity solid, trade balance nearly cut in half, and jobless claims well-behaved. It's good reason why equities may have reversed, and interest rates once again that 10-year, testing the top of the range, right below 4.20%.

Sara, back to you.

Sara Eisen (2:46)

Okay, Rick, thank you. I just want to run you through some of those data points that Rick just highlighted, because it was a really good day in terms of data for the overall economy. Remember, I mentioned yesterday that we're starting to see a productivity boom in this country? Well, we got the numbers, and I just wanted to show you because they were stronger than even high expectations on productivity, up 4.9% in the third quarter. That's the highest level we've seen since 2023, and it's very strong. Remember, productivity growth is important. It's important for growth. It's important for companies and businesses as they try to offset inflationary pressures and any tariff issues. And, I mean, ultimately, David, if we see a longer, more protracted productivity booms, it solves a lot of problems.

David Faber (3:29)

Didn't we talk about this yesterday?

Sara Eisen (3:30)

We did, but I wanted to bring you the numbers because I knew they weren't going to be good. But they were really good.

David Faber (3:36)

Oh, okay.

Sara Eisen (3:36)

So I'm doing a victory lap.

David Faber (3:37)

I just remember we had the conversation yesterday.

Sara Eisen (3:39)

Exactly. I just wanted to show you that the numbers came in even stronger than my high expectations. Another good piece of data was the jobless claims. Yes, these are kind of, they vary.

They can be seasonal, holiday affected, but they continue to point to just fewer firings in this economy. Only 8,000 more Americans filed for jobless claims last week. We're sort of hovering around that 200,000 level. You would think with a rising unemployment rate and less demand out there for labor that maybe companies would be cutting back. We're just not seeing that. We're not seeing it. It's good news. And even the challenger data, which is always bad news, even though the challenger data, Carl, showed less bad news. Job cuts were the lowest since July 2024 Hiring intentions in that report were the highest for any December since 2022 We'll see what jobs report from the government shows on Friday.