SOTS 2nd Hour: Tariffs Deep-Dive with Peter Navarro, & the Jobs Report Breakdown 3/7/25

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Sara Eisen (0:59)

Good Friday morning. Welcome to another hour of 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. Things are looking a little bit better today, although the S&P 500 is unchanged. Nasdaq higher by about, I don't know, a tenth of 1%. We do have some groups under the hood that are rallying today. Energy, for instance, stocks up 1.4%. Utilities, so it's a little defensive. Technology is doing better up a half a percent. Real estate, industrials and materials, everybody else is lower. Financials getting hit again down another 1% for the week. The financials group down 6.25%. We're also tracking for big weekly declines. The S&P, for instance, is down more than 3.5% on the week. The Nasdaq down almost 4%.

Take a look at Treasuries. It's been mostly buying Treasuries with lower yields. That continues today, but there was a little pop yesterday off those German boon yields, which have gone crazy lately. The 10-year yield, 4.25%. We'll digest jobs in just a moment. Also big interview just moments away. White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, Peter Navarro with us. His take on the latest tariff moves and jobs data, it has been a week. But first, 30 minutes here into the trading session. Here are three big movers we're watching. Broadcom shares higher after stronger than expected numbers and guidance from the chipmaker. More on the street's reaction and what it means for the semis overall, which are now technically trading in bear market, which means they're 20% off their recent highs. Though that's why the tech sector is a little bit higher today because of Broadcom. Tesla on track for its seventh straight week of declines. That's the longest weekly losing streak on record for Tesla. Shares now nearly 40% lower since President Trump took office. More on the Tesla trade coming up as well and what to do there. And then some big sector moves this week. Banks on pace for their worst week since August 2024 Energy and Consumer Discretionary on track for their worst weeks since 2023

Amid all of the back and forth over trade concerns, weakness in the economy, we did get the jobs data. And I do think it's a relief, the jobs data for February, because it wasn't weaker. And the fact that we did see job growth in key parts of the economy, that was good. 151,000 jobs in February. It was less than the consensus at 160,000. The unemployment rate did rise to 4.1%. That was also a bit of a surprise. Consensus was 4%. Average hourly earnings, and this is important because we're on Inflation Watch, they matched expectations, only rising 0.3% for the month. And also importantly, the increase in January, which was a very hot wage number, was revised a little bit lower to 0.4%. Where the jobs were, well, health care, biggest job creator, again, financial activities, transportation and warehousing, social assistance. Where they weren't, retail, food and beverage retailers, and then, so federal government subtracted 10,000 jobs, but government payrolls overall were up 11,000 jobs thanks to state and local governments, which I think came as a bit of a surprise, but also might be stale. There's the doge impact on the federal workforce, down 10,000.

I'll just dive a little bit deeper, guys. There are some points of weakness to pay attention to. Overall, not a terrible number, doesn't change anything for the Fed, which is firmly on pause. However, for the rise in the unemployment rate we talked about, it reflects more people who permanently lost their job, and also the participation rate fell by 0.2 points. So it's not like it rose for the right reasons. It rose showing some weakness. Joblessness was particularly notable among Hispanic people and those without a high school diploma. Interesting, the number of people working part time for economic reasons actually surged. We're at a four-year high on that number. And then, David, the number of Americans holding multiple jobs, which is also kind of a sign of weakness, climbed to a record high, nearly 8.9 million people. So just some things to be aware of as we try to figure out where we are in this cycle.