SOTS 2nd Hour: Stocks Rally on Strait of Hormuz Reopening, Exclusive: KeyCorp CEO, Anthropic’s White House Meeting 4/17/26

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Sara Eisen (1:05)

Good Friday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with David Faber, live at Post 9 as always of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl has the morning off. Coming up this hour, we will talk about the jump for the major averages from the Iran War lows and more strength this morning on this news out of the Strait of Hormuz. Plus, much more on Netflix results in the quarter as the stock pulls back hard after earnings missed and Chairman Reed Hastings announces he will leave the board in June down more than 9%. And it's another Supreme Court opinion day. I mean, we are awaiting a potential decision this hour on President Trump's authority to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Of course, we'll bring that to you, any headlines, as soon as we get them, if we get them. But David, I wanted to kick it off with the consumer as we often do because we now know how tax returns are looking and tax refunds are looking and they are up. And this was expected because of the changes in the one big beautiful bill and the, you know, the fact that money is going to get returned to people. So we do have some numbers and some charts. So here's look 2026 It's the top line and you can see we're tracking a lot higher than we have been in recent years. So they're up 14% year over year at this point.

You know, that, how that compares to expectations. Morgan Stanley actually expected a lot more 15 to 25% increase. They're the ones we took the chart from, but the average refund is up 11%.

So that's $346 per return. About 75% of refunds are normally paid out by now. So that gives you a good sense of where we're tracking. It should be good. It should be stimulative for the economy. The only but here is oil prices are higher and gas prices are higher. So the question I think for economists is, and investors, is how much of this bump gets offset by those higher gas prices.

David Faber (2:56)

Although they don't seem to have been hurting consumers that much in terms of their ability to want to spend, not to mention, of course, as we'll get to in a moment, a dramatic plunge in oil prices today, Sara. Yeah.

Sara Eisen (3:10)

Well, you asked about the gas prices, right? And I wanted to zoom in a little bit because I said that they were off the highs and they've been coming down a little bit.

David Faber (3:17)

Yesterday, yeah. You didn't like when I challenged you on that, did you?

Sara Eisen (3:20)

Well, just look in the last month and I think overall we're a lot higher, of course, but look at the last month.

David Faber (3:27)

And I said we were down and then I sort of, yeah.

Sara Eisen (3:29)

We're down. We're down a little bit. We're off the highs, you know. But yes, we're still above $4 a gallon.

David Faber (3:35)

Yeah, that may change soon if this recent plunge holds.

Sara Eisen (3:39)

It should come down more because it reacts to the price of oil with a little bit of a lag. So that definitely should happen. I would just say that New York Post, I don't know if you saw the cover of the Post today.

David Faber (3:53)

I don't actually see the hard copy of the Post very often. I didn't even know they still had it.

Sara Eisen (3:58)

So their workers rejoice as Trump's tax law bumps tax refunds 11% to average $3,462.

David Faber (4:06)

Very nice. Yeah, I usually go for the back. I have a big sports.

Sara Eisen (4:10)

The back of the sports one.

David Faber (4:10)