SOTS 2nd Hour: What Goes Up... Inside An Oil Price Plunge, Evercore's Vice Chairman, & Don't Trust Software? 3/10/26

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Sara Eisen (1:00)

Good Tuesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and Mike Santoli. We are live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber is off today. Coming up this hour, Evercore's Krishna Guha talks to us about the wild headline driven swings in this market, where he thinks stocks are going from here. Plus, we've got a major interview with the US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Wyckoff on what comes next in the war with Iran. And we are looking ahead to the next catalyst for tech in the AI trade as Oracle gets set to report results in just a few hours.

Carl Quintanilla (1:31)

Let's get some existing homes with our Diana Ollick this morning. Hey Diana.

Diana Olick (1:35)

Good morning, Carl. Existing home sales in February rose 1.7% from January to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 4.09 million units. That is a beat. The street was looking for a slight decline. Now sales were down 1.4% from a year ago. This count represents closed sales, so deals from December and January when mortgage rates stayed in a low range near 6%.

There were 1.29 million units for sale at the end of February, up 2.4% from January, up 4.9% from the year before. That makes a 3.8-month supply of inventory. Six months is considered a balanced market. Now tight supply is still pressuring prices. The median price of a home sold in February $398,000, an increase of 0.3% year over year. It continues to take longer to sell a home. 47 days up from 42 a year ago. 34% of buyers were first timers, an increase from 31% a year ago, and 16% of sales were to investors, unchanged from a year ago. Just a quick note, I've got an in-depth interview with celebrity real estate CEO Ryan Serhant on the Property Play right now. He talks AI, competition with Compass and Mayor Mom Donnie cnbc.com/propertyplay or listen on Apple and Spotify. Sara, back to you.

Sara Eisen (2:49)

Okay, great. We will do so. Thank you, Diana Olek. Guys, this wild ride in energy, of course, now down after President Trump spoke yesterday and sort of alluded to the fact that we've made a lot of progress in the war against Iran and it's not gonna be a forever war and it should wrap up soon, not this week, but maybe soon. Confirmed by Peter Hegseth, the Defense Department of War secretary this morning. Again, weaker oil prices should be relief for those worried about the high gas prices. Beyond the high gas prices, and there's been a lot of sort of hand wringing about that right now, you know, there is one piece of good news about the consumer that's kind of in the background here that should be really helpful at a time of higher oil prices and higher gas prices and that's the tax refunds. So Bank of America started tracking tax refunds and you can see the yellow line which is 2026 of where we're tracking so far this year and it's above a lot of the recent years. Total amount refunded now through March 6th up 9% year over year and that's an acceleration. It was 7% last year. So the average refund now total amount is up 11%.

If historical patterns hold, they say tax refunds will likely remain elevated for the next few weeks through tax filing date, which is April 15th, of course. So that is some extra sort of money in consumer's wallets as we deal with some of the affordability concerns around higher gas prices.

Carl Quintanilla (4:18)

It's a little confusing because the number of refunds outright is lagging 2025 So whoever's getting them is getting a nice one, but at this point, the average-

Mike Santoli (4:27)

The average size is up a fair bit. There's no doubt about it. I think the real question is, that's been telegraphed for such a long time. I feel like that money has been sort of promised to all these different corners of the market. There was a decline in the savings rate. There might be some pull forward going to have an offset with energy prices. I don't think there's much of a doubt that we came into this period with some tailwinds. For the consumer, the question is, is the market willing to rely on that and extrapolate out from that? Consumer cyclical has been a bad place in this market. Obviously, it's a very reflex trade against higher energy prices. For as dramatic as the decline has been in crude, what are we up? Still 35 percent from where we were at the end of February, which is usually what qualifies as an oil spike.