SOTS 2nd Hour: Stocks Fall as Oil Surges. How to Navigate Energy, Emerging Markets, & More 3/9/26

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Sara Eisen (0:58)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and Mike Santoli today. We're live at Post 9 David Faber has the day off. We are at the New York Stock Exchange as always. Stocks are under pressure. Every sector is red right now except for energy, which is holding up the best because oil is surging. WTI crude up 9.5 percent, 99.49 a barrel. Brent, the international benchmark is above 101 a barrel. It's up 9.5 percent as well and that's taking a bite out of the major averages. Consumer discretionary is the worst performing sector right now. Coming up this hour, we'll be all over this huge move in oil and what it means for every part of the market. Plus Rockefeller's Ruchir Sharma will join us as global equities see big swings on the escalating war in the Middle East. Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is with us. Big warning about what she calls an AI-driven mass unemployment crisis, and just what government is supposed to do about it. But guys, we have to start with the move in oil prices, which is sharp and it is high, pushing Brent above $100 a barrel. Now more than $101 a barrel. We're off the highs of the session. But still, it is a big jump and now a big jump of what we've seen since this war began. So one thing I decided to do is take a look at some of the countries that this hurts the most, the biggest importers of oil, right? US imports a little, but we export a lot too, because we're mostly self-sufficient on oil. But here is the countries that are not. China is the world's biggest importer of oil. Now the good news for China is that they stockpile a lot, so they have a lot of reserves. But there are countries like India, South Korea, Japan, that are nearly, I don't know, 90, 95 percent dependent on oil, meaning imports minus exports.

They don't produce oil. Also, Europe, a lot of European countries, like Germany, for instance, is nearly fully dependent on oil. It's no wonder we see sharp swings in markets like the KOSPI, which, yes, was one of the darlings of the market and built up. It's an AI-driven market, not an energy-driven market. So South Korea's economy is certainly vulnerable. Places like India, they do price control so that they don't have out-of-control inflation. But it's certainly a weight on their fiscal position when they have to pay up these higher prices for oil right now.

Michael Santoli (3:11)

Yeah, and the market has been pretty careful in trying to hand out the punishment according to who is most hit and also according to the markets that were up the most. It's really interesting how the overnight hours have absorbed a lot of the shock both on oil and equity prices. So the S&P 500 at the lows yesterday overnight were down more than 2% off of Friday's close.

Sara Eisen (3:33)

I mean, Japan was down five and a half, South Korea was down six.

Michael Santoli (3:36)

And WTI was up at 115 at the high. So it shows you that you've had this moderating effect when the US hours open. The rest of the world equity markets are down like 8.5% month to date. S&P down like 3.5%.

S&P did this morning, though, get to a minus 5% off the highs pullback. Doesn't really mean a lot in the abstract, but it shows you that the downside has been kind of grudging. I think that every price is a position on the spectrum of probabilities, and the stock market in the US has wanted to remain open to the idea that we get de-escalation, we get relief, we get a short duration crisis, and we can move on from there. Whether we get that or not, unclear, but the market doesn't want to price out the possibility.