SOTS 2nd Hour: Software Rebounds, Salesforce CEO Pushback, & LIVE: Paramount Skydance's David Ellison 3/5/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Thy ticket, Lady Jennifer of Coolidge.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

Well, many thanks, good sir. Heareth my Discover card.

Julia Boorstin (0:08)

They accept Discover at Renaissance fairs?

SPEAKER_2 (0:10)

Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Getteth with the times.

Julia Boorstin (0:17)

With the times?

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

You're playing the lute.

SPEAKER_1 (0:21)

Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

David Faber (0:23)

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide.

SPEAKER_5 (0:27)

Based on the February 2025 Nielsen Report.

SPEAKER_6 (0:30)

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Sara Eisen (0:59)

Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live as always at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. We've got two cannot miss interviews coming your way. Just a moment. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison will be with us live from the Paramount lot in his first interview since the company beat out Netflix in the battle for Warner Brothers. Plus we will hear from Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, his stock climbing today but down more than 20 percent this year on fears that AI will eat into the software business. But guys, let's return to the economic data because it is a jobs week. We get the big jobs report on Friday and we have a lot of good sources of information showing that the jobs market is okay, is in decent shape. Let's start with this morning. We got the weekly jobless claims number. So the number of Americans filing for unemployment claims, guess what? It was a little bit better and still continues to paint a pretty okay picture where you're not seeing any kind of spike in layoffs. Jobless claims came in at 213,000. 215,000 was the estimate, so it was better than that. 213,000 was prior, so it stabilizes. The four-week moving average just to smooth out all the weeks of all this noise, down to 215,000, which is actually a four-week low. That is good news. It means that companies aren't picking up their layoffs. And we have another piece of good news on that front as well from the Challenger, Challenger Grand Christmas. This is the private sector report that does layoff announcements. And here's what they said, 48,307 job cuts in February. And that was down 55% from January. This is clearly a volatile series, down 72% from the same month last year. So really, the whole low hire, low fire kind of narrative around the jobs report holds up with this layoff data. And then on the hiring side, so that's the layoff side. On the hiring side, Carl, we didn't really talk about it, but ADP yesterday for the month of February was good. 63,000 jobs added in the month, 50K expected. It doesn't necessarily correlate that well with the monthly government jobs report, which we'll get tomorrow, but it's just good information. And I think it reinforces the Fed's characterization of the labor market, which is stable.

Carl Quintanilla (3:09)

Yeah, although of the 63, as you saw, 58 was education and healthcare. We lost 28 in financials, professional business services. It's all sort of still resting on one big pillar.

Sara Eisen (3:20)

Yeah, which is sort of like health care, education services. Construction was a real bright spot. That was good. Obviously, there's a lot of people needed to build data centers, right? But for sure, a lot of it is focused on that education, health services, part of the economy. I would also just point out in that number, the wages were pretty solid, you know, unchanged. And just from the data, what ADP said was we've seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for people who stay in their jobs. So overall, just a solid read on February jobs. If there was any anxiety that the jobs picture is getting worse, which is out there. I mean, people are wondering about that because we haven't seen the kind of hiring numbers that we saw in the last few years.

Carl Quintanilla (4:00)

It's actually it is pretty encouraging. Maybe now the worry is back to back to inflation. Barking on the tape today saying maybe this fight is not yet done. We've already talked about gas prices today.

We know what CorePCE did. We know what PPI did. Some of these ISM numbers.