SOTS 2nd Hour: Tariff Turmoil: EU & Apple Impacts, Plus: Apollo’s Torsten Slok 5/23/25

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Sara Eisen (1:09)

Good Friday morning, welcome back to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber, live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Stock's under pressure this morning. Prospect of higher tariffs in the EU on Apple. S&P's down 1%.

You've got every sector lower right now. NASDAQ's down 1.3%. If you look at what's getting hit the hardest, it is information technology, consumer discretionary at the bottom of the list, the chip makers under pressure. For the week overall, looks like we're chalking up declines of about 3% on the S&P 500 On the NASDAQ, almost 3% as well. Treasuries, they've been in focus lately on the back of higher yields. We're seeing lower yields today. So there's buying, the 10-year yield goes to 4.5, two-year yield just below 4%, and the 30, which we're watching also, just about 5%. Coming up, Apple adding to sizable losses on the week as President Trump threatens the company with tariffs on any phones made outside the US. More on the fallout straight ahead. Plus, Apollo's Torsten Slok is here with more on how rising rates are hitting the market and impacting one specific sector more than the rest.

Carl Quintanilla (2:15)

Let's get the final macro print of the week and some housing data with Rick Santelli. Hey, Rick.

Rick Santelli (2:21)

Yes, new home sales for the month of April. And boy, this number is surprisingly strong.

743,000 seasonally adjusted, annualized units of single homes, and that's up almost 11% from a downwardly revised 724 in the rear view mirror that becomes 670,000. This is the highest pace on new home sales going all the way back, get this, February of 22 And we weren't expecting it. If you looked at existing home sales for April, it was down half a 1%. It's pace at 4 million seasonally adjusted annual units was the slowest April pace. And April's important kind of the beginning of that spring season going all the way back to 9 And the median price for April in existing home sales, 414,000, was the highest for any medium price in April ever. So this really is surprising. And for more detail on why this might have kicked up, let's go to Diana Olick.

Diana Olick (3:23)

Diana Olick, I'll echo your surprise on this one, because when you look at how these numbers are counted, new home sales are based on signed contracts. So people out shopping during April, that's when the average rate on the 30 year fix went from 6.71% to well over 7% before dropping back a little bit during the end of the month. But what's interesting here, though, and you set a price, so I have a median price of $407,200 down 2.2% year over year. That's what the builders have been talking about. We heard from Toll Brothers this week that they were lowering prices a bit. And then there are the mortgage rate buy downs, which the builders are able to do and which the existing home sellers are not really able to do. So you're also seeing supply is actually up dramatically up 8.6% year over year. So you're looking at the builders with a lot of supply on their hands. They do have the levers to pull to lower prices and to buy down those mortgage rates. But again, when you saw all the volatility in April, whether it was the stock market after that big tariff announcement, it's really surprising because the builders have told us that they did see a softening in April. So the question is, do we get a real pullback on this in May? We did see that pullback, the revision down in March, too much lower than expected. So this is an interesting one. We'll have to watch it going forward. But if you look at the existing market, which has a lot more supply on it and is not moving at all, this number is a real outlier. I just end with that, David.