SOTS 2nd Hour: Qualcomm-Arm Ruling, Fed's Rate Path, Markets & Geopolitical Risks 12/23/24

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Sara Eisen (0:58)

Good Monday morning again. Welcome to another hour of Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Scott Wapner today, live at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl and David have the morning off. Stocks are higher for the most part, at least the S&P and the NASDAQ are. S&P just went flat to negative. It's been a tech outperforming day and that's why the NASDAQ remains higher. Thank you Broadcom, Nvidia, Tesla's up again, Meta, AMD, some of the biggest winners of the year. Apple is also in that group, but most of the rest of the sectors right now are a little bit lower. I'm looking at staples, utilities, energy, industrials, they're all weaker this morning. That's why the S&P 500 is wavering around the flat line. Treasuries have been a big story. Higher treasury yields, potentially standing in the way of equity gains, and they're higher again today, 455 on the 10-year, the 2-year, 4.3 after that hawkish cut we got from Fed SharePowell last week.

Scott Wapner (1:50)

Outside of the markets within the last hour, Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, arriving at a Manhattan criminal courthouse. He pleaded not guilty to 11 charges, including first-degree murder in furtherance of terrorism. We'll keep certainly our eyes on that developing story throughout this day as well, but these were pictures from within the last hour here in Manhattan.

Sara Eisen (2:13)

We are 30 minutes now into the trading session. Here are some big movers we are watching. Honda and Nissan officially beginning merger talks to create the world's third largest automaker with the CEO of Honda saying that if the deal does go through, the merged group has the potential to deliver revenue of roughly 190 billion US dollars. It's certainly been helpful to Nissan shares in the past week or so. Novo Nordic shares rebounding following Friday's big slide. It was down 20 percent. Eli Lilly also gets a boost after the FDA approved its ZEP bound for the treatment of sleep apnea. And then I mentioned Apple hitting new record highs this morning as Mega Cap Tech continues to march higher. The stock doesn't take much, but it is adding to recent gains. Dan Ives of Web Bush says iPhone 16 sales so far are going better or in line with expectations.

Scott Wapner (3:02)

All right. Got some economic data crossing the tape as we speak. Rick Santelli has that for us.

SPEAKER_5 (3:06)

Hi, Rick.

Rick Santelli (3:08)

Hi. Indeed, we have our December reads on consumer confidence from the Conference Board. Expecting a headline number around 113 comes in on the light side 104.7. And last month, well, it upgrades from 111.7 to 112.8. 104.7. Well, that would be the lightest going back to September. But that is coming off the best read since the last month's read was the best going all the way back to July of 23 So headlines still holding up pretty well, although it was a bit of a disappointment with regard to this month. If we look at present situation, 140.2, that follows a 141.4. These are back to back the best numbers we've had since February and March of the beginning of this year. And finally, if we look at expectations, what will lie ahead? That's 81.1. Big miss there. That will be the lightest level going back to June of this year. And in addition, we see that new home sales are out close to expectations, 664,000 seasonally adjusted annualized units. And that follows a slightly revised 627,000.

We see that interest rates, as Sara pointed out, are to the upside. 455.1 is up 3 It equals the up 3 basis points we're seeing in a 2-year. And steepening curve, we're back over 21 in 2s to 10s. Sara, back to you.