SOTS 2nd Hour: SEC Chair Atkins, The Netflix Playbook, and AT&T + Applied Digital CEOs 10/22/25

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Sara Eisen (1:06)

Good Wednesday 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, more big name earnings rolling in ahead of results tonight from Tesla and IBM. We'll talk to AT&T CEO John Stankey about his company's quarter and how new iPhones factored into those results. Plus, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins will be with us to talk crypto, potential changes to quarterly earnings, and how the shutdown is impacting the agency's work.

Also ahead, a big winner in the AI trade, we'll talk to the CEO of Applied Digital, up 300% this year, just announcing news of a multi-billion dollar AI factory deal. But guys, as the earnings roll in, we continue to monitor for signs of demand from consumers and on the economy, especially because we don't have any official data because of the shutdown, though we will get CPI on Friday. Did have a chance to hear from Wells Fargo, biggest banks, one of the biggest banks in America. CEO Charlie Sharpe spoke to him at the Economic Club of New York yesterday. And boy, did he sound bullish and enthusiastic about what's happening in the US economy and with US consumers. Listen.

Charlie Scharf (2:13)

Consumer spend is up in debit cards. Consumer spend is up in credit cards. And it's up like five or six percent year over year, every single week, week after week after week. Fuel prices go up, people spend a little bit less on everything else. Fuel prices go down, they spend more.

And it's true of all the other categories that you see. There's this general level of growth and spend that you see. Consumers are spending, but they're not drawing down savings to do that. If you look at overall savings rates, deposit balances are increasing slightly. And they're not doing it at the expense of credit performance.

Sara Eisen (2:53)

He talked a lot more about credit performance. I'll share with you more comments next hour, especially on some of the bumps we've seen in the market around some of those regional callouts from Zions Bank, for instance, Western Alliance and Jeffries. Again, very positive tone from him. We'll hear more about that. But those comments were echoed, Carl, by what we got, say, from Capital One today. Here's the CEO on the call. The US consumer and overall macroeconomy have been quite resilient so far. When we look at our own numbers, we're not seeing a lot of separation there. It isn't lost on us that some of the economic metrics out there and some of the things show a little bit more pressure on the lower income, but we're not seeing differential impacts in our portfolio. Sharf also mentioned the gap in incomes, but overall, the picture looks good. Yeah.

Carl Quintanilla (3:38)

A lot of people yesterday were pointing to the loan to deposit ratio, which would suggest that the banks, whether they're regional or big banks, have plenty of deposits to cover whatever loans may go bad.

Sara Eisen (3:50)

Yes. Something that Sharf talked about was how some of these loans were actually alleged fraud, not necessarily something systemic or underlying stress that are leading to the bad loans, but you always have to be on guard for what's next. As far as just the consumer though, Hilton reported as well on travel. I know there have been some concerns that people are paying back travel, but listen to what Chris Nacetta said, we remain optimistic that in the US, lower interest rates and more favorable regulatory environment, certainty on tax policy and a significant investment cycle will accelerate economic growth and travel demand. I mean, directly pinning it to a lot of this administration's policies here on favorable regulatory environment and certainty on the tax and investment cycle. But he sort of echoed what he told me at the Waldorf a few weeks ago, but just that that paints a pretty bright picture for growth here in the US and travel.