SOTS 2nd Hour: Powell DOJ Probe Gets Dropped & Tech's Tear Higher 4/24/26

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Sara Eisen (0:58)

Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with David Faber and Mike Santoli. Today we are live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Quintanilla has the morning off. Coming up this hour, Intel, the latest tech name to see a wild post earnings move, surging after results here of 22 percent. We'll talk to noted investor Dan Niles about where he's putting his money to work as we get ready for numbers next week from five of the Mag 7 companies. Also ahead, Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman is with us to talk about the latest in Iran and hopes for renewed peace talks here. And former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz joins us to discuss the potential government rescue of Spirit Airlines.

Michael Santoli (1:37)

Consumer sentiment just crossing the tape. Rick Santoli has that for us. Morning, Rick.

Rick Santoli (1:42)

Good morning, Mike and Dean. Now these are final reads for April. And the mid-month reads had some shocking news within there, some historic lows. So let's look at it. 47.6 was our mid-month read on headline. That was the lowest ever going back to the 70s, which my database does. It rises to 49.8, but it's only the best since March, the month before these numbers were released. 52.5 is current conditions up from 50.1. And 50.1 was also the all-time back to 70s low. And it moves up to 52.5.

And since in March final read, we were 55 and change, it comes to March as well. Expectations, what lies ahead? Well, it still remains under 50, 46.1 in the rear-view mirror. That was the lowest since the 1980s. And it moves now, well, it moves now to 48.1, 48.1, you guessed it, the best since March, and we are at 51.7. Now let's get to the inflation reads. The one-year inflation mid-month read was 4.8. It moderates to 4.7. And of course, that would be the lowest, you guessed it, since March when it was under 4%.

And finally, our 5- to 10-year inflation, mid-month 3.4, it moves up a 10 to 3.5. That would be the warmest since October of last year. We see that the interest rates have really spiked up a bit this week, losing a little bit of their composure. As we sit at 3.82 in a 2-year, it's down a couple on the day, but it's up 11 on the week, 4.33 on a 10

Unched on the day, up 8 on the week. And pay attention to that 4.35 level, Sara. That was basically the high intraday yesterday. And today, if you close above that, we probably extend this sell off, pushing yields higher. Back to you, Sara.

Sara Eisen (3:35)

Well, watch that, 4.35. Thank you, Rick Santoli, very much from Chicago. You know, as far as inflation and jobs, these are really some of the core debates right now in the markets. Do we have problems on either front? And you know, there's renewed questions about it. We've got some new job reduction news, for instance. After the bell yesterday, Nike announced, you know, it's going to be laying off 1,400 of its staff. It's less than 2% of the global workforce. Meta confirmed the 10% job cuts of its workers, 8,000 of them. Microsoft is giving voluntary buyouts. I mean, this all feeds the question. One, is AI coming for the jobs? And two, is there some sort of cyclical downturn that companies are preparing for? And I thought this chart from Wolf Research was really notable on that front because they say it's neither. It's just kind of a normalization.

What they're looking at here is select tech companies' growth in terms of employees over the last few years. And what they're showing is that some of the recent layoff announcements could just be a renormalization of companies and headcounts of employees that started to grow coming out of COVID, right? Where the job market was tied and everybody just increased capacity and that there was just so much pent up demand and momentum. And then things are maybe coming back down to earth a little bit. They're looking at companies like Apple and Netflix and ServiceNow and Tesla. And they don't see this as sort of like a harbinger of bad news necessarily. It's more just right sizing the business. And I can tell you, David and Mike, from some of my reporting around Nike, for instance, which is one of the latest job cuts.