SOTS 2nd Hour: Trump Trade Tensions Latest, Bitcoin Bedlam, & Powell Under Fire 7/14/25

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Sara Eisen (1:02)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla. We are live from post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber has the morning off. Stocks are under a little bit of pressure this morning. Nothing dramatic, though, after our new tariff threats over the weekend. The S&P down two tenths of 1%.

NASDAQ pulls back just a little bit, less than that, and the Dow down 50 points, as for Treasuries this morning. We get a lot of data coming this week. Show you where we are, mixed picture. There's buying, at least at the front end of the curve, all the way to the 10s, 4.413. The 30-year, a little bit firmer. Long bonds are surging, actually, yields around the world. That's been a story. We're seeing it in Japan, seeing it in Europe. The 30-year yield just below that 5%. Today, trouble in China for Tesla. Why a newcomer to the electric vehicle market could pose a fresh threat to Musk's empire. And as President Trump warns of 30% tariffs in the EU and Mexico, Ruchir Sharma here to tell us about the potential impact on the global market and the global economy. Carly mentioned it's a big week for the markets. That's because we got a lot of economic data and a lot of important earnings. So the biggie is going to come tomorrow, CPI inflation. We're trying to figure out whether these tariffs are spurring higher consumer prices. That's been the story. So far, they haven't. Let's see what CPI holds for June tomorrow. And PPI, too. That's the wholesale prices. We'll also get a read on the consumer with retail sales, which I'm looking forward to on Thursday, and then some housing data as well. And then the big banks are all going to start reporting earnings. We'll obviously talk to Wells Fargo executives, but we'll get a read from the big banks, the gas managers like BlackRock, to hear what they say about the consumer, about the economy, about the markets and how everybody's been digesting tariffs. So far, it's been sort of a glass half full approach, whereas economic growth has been revised higher and the inflation genie hasn't come out of the bottle and the market has responded very well to that.

Carl Quintanilla (2:56)

Yep, a tame print on CPI would basically be five in a row. We'll see if we can even get away with a negative PPI, which some argue would pave the way for a rate cut. And then retail sales, there has been some scrutiny of the lower income cohort, B of A last week, saying that spending is negative year on year, but obviously they don't do the lion's share of spending.

Sara Eisen (3:17)

No, and we got some good reads recently from names like Aritzia or Delta. You know, the big story that's percolating, and I wonder if the market is going to start to price in a bigger risk of, it's been so far relatively calm, is this Powell story. So I think we have to talk about what's been going on because the political pressure on Powell has really started to ramp up over the weekend. Kevin Hassett, just this morning on Squawk Box, okay, this is the chief economic advisor of the president. He is considered a front-runner to be the next Fed chair. They're really making a lot of noise about this new $2.5 billion renovation at the Fed. Listen to what Mr. Hassett said this morning.

SPEAKER_5 (3:54)

Yes or no answer, does the president, in your view, have the authority to fire the Fed chair?

Kevin Hassett (4:00)

That's a thing that's being looked at to, but certainly if there's cause, he does. I think that we've got a real problem of oversight and excess spending, and to put it in perspective, the cost overrun right now is 700 million dollars. The second biggest redivision of a building that we've ever had in the history of DC was the Federal Reserve Building, I mean, the FBI building, and the FBI building, the whole thing costs about the same as this cost overrun at the Fed. And so I think that we definitely need to rethink the way the Fed's acting. We 100 percent want independent monetary policy, but it sure looks like they need more congressional oversight on things like the way they build their buildings.