Wild Week for Stocks, Trump Calls for a “Say” In Fed Policy, Paramount Cuts 15% of Workforce 8/9/24

Carl Quintanilla (0:00)

Market Moving Insight and Analysis join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street.

David Faber (0:08)

Good Friday morning, and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber with Mike Santoli. We're live from Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange, Carl Quintanilla. He's at the Olympics, finishing things off there, of course. Big day and weekend ahead in Paris. Jim has a well-deserved morning off. Let's give you a look at futures as we wrap up a volatile week. You know, we use that word a lot, but I think it's really applicable this time. It has been volatile, and we are looking at what would appear for a lower open. But again, doesn't mean much of anything, given what we've already seen this week during the session. So our roadmap does begin with that wild week of trading. As I said, the S&P and the NASDAQ aiming to avoid what's their fourth straight week of losses. Plus, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump saying he should have a voice when the Fed makes its decisions on interest rates and Paramount Global Reporting results. That sends the stock higher in the pre-market media company, taking a big right down, though, announcing it's going to cut as much as 15% of its US workforce as well. Let's start with the markets. The S&P coming off its biggest rally since November of 2022

All three major indices, though, still down for the week. Mike Santoli, always happy to have you here to tell us what your thoughts are and what we've seen so far this week. Are we done with the worries? I mean, of course we're not. We have worries about a recession now that suddenly this week, everybody was talking about in a way that we certainly didn't hear even a couple of weeks ago. Yes, there's been some data to support it, but it's not clear to me that there's enough to support quite how much it seems to have impacted our markets.

Mike Santoli (1:41)

I mean, if you looked at the market, actually, first of all, S&P down half a percent on a week-to-date basis. Obviously, it doesn't look like much, but it went down just about 10 percent peak-to-low, 3 percent down on Monday alone. And that was if you just took it as a macro message saying it was a recession panic or it was a growth scare.

It had these accelerants, though. Of course, we spent plenty of time, who knows if it's too much time, talking about crowded trades, yen-carry trades, forced repositioning, liquidations. The VIX goes to 60 in a phantom print for a second on Monday morning. All of that stuff kind of bundled together represents to me, coming off of a condition when we got to mid-July, when we got to the record highs of extreme confidence and optimism about the likelihood of a soft landing, the Fed was going to do the right thing for the right reasons at the correct pace. You didn't have to worry about these volatility eruptions. What we are right now is we're past that positioning stress, that idea that we have to worry about some other shoe dropping coming from the macrochairs. I think that's where we are right now. You're monitoring the vital signs. The VIX has come down to 24 The Yen has calmed down a little bit. All of those things. But I do think the path from here, even if it's a soft landing, is going to feature a lot of mixed data. I think that's what we have to absorb.

David Faber (3:06)

Well, there is an expectation, of course, in September. I think it's the 18th. We're going to get a cut now, whether it's 25 or 50, I guess, is more in play. We're going to get another CPI report, a PCE. We're going to get a bunch of things between now and then that we'll talk about endlessly. But I wonder when it comes to this market, in terms of especially the mega-cap tech names, is NVIDIA the next real thing that we kind of wait for? And that's a ways away.

Mike Santoli (3:31)

It's in three weeks. Yeah. And I do think, well, it's the next thing we know about in terms of the big macro input that does have the power to kind of either reinforce or refute the optimism around AI, which is already obviously undergoing a bit of a rethink right here. We do, I do think the retail sales numbers and the earnings from the big retailers, they're gonna get a lot of attention because we're getting Walmart, right?

David Faber (3:56)