SOTS 2nd Hour: What's Next In Iran, ADP Jobs/Retail Sales Takeaways, & Nike's Next Shoe To Drop 4/1/26

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Sara Eisen (1:04)

Good Wednesday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla and David Faber. We are live at Post 9 as always of the New York Stock Exchange. Ahead this hour is a comeback rally for real. We'll talk about the big whoosh hire that started yesterday afternoon and discuss whether it's sustainable. Plus Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman here as the president posts about Iran ahead of a key speech this evening. And much more on Nike as that stock tanks following a number of high profile downgrades after the company warned about declining sales. I've got a lot of analysis and reporting for you on that one.

Carl Quintanilla (1:38)

Let's get some ISMs this morning and inventories with Rick Santelli. Hey Rick.

Rick Santelli (1:42)

Good morning Carl. Yes, business inventories. This is a January number. Comes in at a minus one tenth of a percent. Now that isn't far from expectations which were unchanged. But what's notable here is it's the first negative number since December 24 So we want to pay attention to that. Last month, we lost a tenth from a tenth to zero. But of course zero isn't a negative number. We're expecting our ISMs, ISM PMIs. These are March reads. I don't see them populating yet. We did have retail sales better than expected and we did see S&P Global Manufacturing roughly the same as the mid-month read. But as I said, I don't see these numbers populating yet. So I'm going to kick it back to you Carl when the data comes out, you guys can come back to me. Let's keep it at 53.1.

Randy Konick (2:39)

52.7?

Rick Santelli (2:42)

Yep, that's what I see. Yes, that's the manufacturing, that's the March read, and 52.7, how does that stack up? 52.7 is pretty strong. That would be the best read going all the way back to the summer of 22 That's the only one I do see at the moment. We want to pay particularly close attention to prices paid because on our last read, it was at the highest level since the summer of 22 Sara, I'm sorry, but that's all I see at the moment.

Sara Eisen (3:11)

Okay, no, thanks, Rick. We'll take the better headline number there, 52.7 versus the 52.1 estimate, little higher yields. And I'll just throw in, to the good news, better beats data, what we got from ADP. If you trust this series, and again, we looked to the government report on Friday, but this was a better headline number. And there's where it stacks up, where you can see. So the economy added 62,000 private sector payrolls in March. After 66,000 in February, February was revised up from the initial estimate of 63 But this was better than the consensus of 40,000. And what was really interesting was that small businesses had a good month of job creation. 85,000 jobs created in small businesses, medium and large businesses were actually negative. So that's where the job growth was, you know, for all the hand wringing about, you know, some of the problems with small business, engine of growth here when it comes to jobs. And if you just want to look, it's always interesting to look by sector of where the jobs were created. Education and Health Services thought that was notable. It's been a source of job creation. It was 58,000. It's notable because in the Joltz data yesterday, that was actually a little source of weakness, that part of the economy. Construction, nicely. We know what's been happening with the boom there in terms of building data centers and everything else. Leisure and Hospitality, which is obviously a huge job sector, added 7,000. Disappointing manufacturing again. Subtracting 11,000. I mean, a year into the tariffs here, that was supposed to be one of the sources of job growth as companies have been investing in the US, but not a ton to show for it on the manufacturing side. But overall, guys, a pretty good number. And just I'll add the wages for job changers, 6.6%. You know, still pretty steady and growing. Job stayers, 4.5%.