SOTS 2nd Hour: U.S. Treasury Secretary LIVE, Fed Decision Predictions, & Altimeter's Brad Gerstner 1/28/26

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Sara Eisen (0:49)

Good Wednesday morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen. Joining today, live from Washington, DC., the Treasury Department is hosting a Trump Accounts Summit in Washington where the president is slated to speak later this morning, along with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber, as always, from the New York Stock Exchange. We've got a great lineup of interviews for you from Washington, including an extended interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Besson in just a moment. And later in the hour, Altimeter Capital founder and CEO Brad Gerstner will join me live from the summit. He came up with the idea of the Trump accounts. On Halftime Report, I'll speak to the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev, and on the exchange, Frank Bisignano, who runs the IRS and is also the commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Plus, we're all over the market moves with earnings from Starbucks, ASML and AT&T this morning.

Carl Quintanilla (1:40)

Let's talk more about the market action today with the S&P hitting 7K for the first time ever. Our Mike Santoli is here at Post9 watching what's moving internally. Interesting yields, pretty sticky here. Market doesn't seem to mine too much.

Mike Santoli (1:52)

No. The volatility in the core of the equity market and in treasuries has been incredibly subdued, especially when you consider what's going on in currencies. The 7,000 tag this morning is interesting largely in that it comes three months to the day after we first got above 6,900 intraday. So that final 100 points has been just this sort of churning sideways thing. And what did it take to get us to that point and get us to the closing record yesterday? Basically, you get the biggest guys on the field for the tush push. And that's literally what happened because before that it was, oh, it's a broadening market. The small caps are doing the work. The banks are participating. You have transports doing it. But until the Mag 7 reengaged, you couldn't quite get the oomph behind it. So I do think it's still worth keeping in mind what is kind of gathering a lot of the aggressive flows, obviously, aside from gold. But the gold, silver, memory chip, the memory chip side of semis, all of it is about literal physical scarcity. The only thing the market has a ton of conviction on right here is we have price-insensitive buyers that just need to get stuff right now, whether it is gold, silver, or it's the memory products. And it's not really about the highest value add or the most innovative or the smartest chips. If you look at the way the semiconductor index has traded relative to NVIDIA and Broadcom in the last year to date, it's just all been the memory side. So we know those trends are in place. Watching the dollar, the fact that it's been a one-way trade probably means it's not going to stay a one-way trade. It's looking really oversold. And so I'm kind of alert to the idea if we get a bounce in the dollar, that's more aggressive because we're as oversold as we were right after Liberation Day.

I want to see what that creates in terms of an unwind in gold and silver and where all the hot money has been flowing.

David Faber (3:42)

Well, has the hot money continued to flow into Micron? I mean, the extent of that stock has just been extraordinary. It is up again today, approaches a half a trillion dollar market value.

Mike Santoli (3:53)

The amazing part of that is their adding capacity. Everyone's obsessed with the order books of the semi-cap companies. Normally, that supply type response on the way should mean that it should soften up, but it's not happening yet.

Carl Quintanilla (4:07)

Let's get back to Sara in DC., Sara.

Sara Eisen (4:10)

Thank you. Well, the Treasury Department is hosting this full day summit here in Washington, highlighting the launch of Trump accounts. This is a federally supported investment initiative for children in the US. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson joins me now to discuss. Thank you for having us here today.