9AM HOUR: Wholesale Inflation Rises, AI Fears, Apple's Foldable iPhone Debut 9/10/26

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0:41Market moving insight and analysis. Join Jim Cramer, David Faber, and me, Carl Quintanilla, on the opening bell hour of CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

0:52Good Thursday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer here at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David favors on assignment. Another tough setup after three straight losses for the S &P. Bond market did not like PPI with the 10-year now 491-ish. Long bond, new cycle high 534. WTI joins Brent above 100 as the Journal says Iran seeks to escalate this conflict. Oil is up eight straight days. That is the longest streak in about three years. Our roadmap begins with the latest read on the economy. B of A's Brian Moynihan says the consumer remains strong despite rising gas prices.

1:27Paul Tudor Jones in the latest to sound the AI alarm. We'll talk about his op-ed. And Apple's new chief, John Turnus, unveiling the company's latest iPhone model. And it does come with a hefty price tag. Let's begin, though, with market reaction to PPI, Jim. We're taking out some of these levels on the 10 and the 30 here today. Actually, two-year, four and a half. Yeah, it's funny that we often think of it. We exclude oil, food and energy, OK? Food's horrible and energy's Carwell, throw this number away. You talk about diesel. Diesel is up so much. It's jumped 24.1%. Diesel is what's causing food.

2:04I mean, people have to recognize that we are a trucking nation, okay? We are not a trained nation which uses 400 gallons of the mile. I mean, 400 gallons for a full trip. What we have here is a surtax that's put on us throughout the chain. And we can't avoid it. And the surtax is a 25 percent diesel. And that's going to be through everything. We all act as if, well, it's fine. It'll be over. But is it over after six months? At what point is it considered not temporal? And I think we are at that point. And I think that we are going to see it just if we don't get our five thousand dollars, which, of course, was ludicrous.

2:45Just no one ever said, well, that's not possible. That's ludicrous. OK. And I'm not talking about Ludacris, who might be a dream force, and I hope he would because I know that Usher's coming. But I do feel that when I look at this, I say, eventually it's going to run into the consumer. It hasn't yet because the consumer has a job and the wages are running a little bit ahead of inflation, according to Brian Wynnehan, the CEO of Bank of America, who certainly knows a lot because he's the second largest bank in the country. Yes. And Scharf told Sarah similar things yesterday in Boston. But, Jim, I mean, consumer discretionary names are off by a fifth in the last month.

3:22Restaurants, we just had Starbucks. That might be the one exception to restaurant weakness. Well, it was because Brian Nichols spoke, and that's great because it has not been. It's been a horrendous stock for the last three weeks. Very few stocks have been as horrible as the discretionary. Macy's put up numbers today. I kind of liked it, but they did miss one line. They missed one line. The stock's down 3%. They missed the revenue guidance. Yes. And that's all that mattered. TGX came in. Yeah, and that's with Blumey's comps up 11. Exactly. And Blumey's is, of course, where Tony Springs is from.

3:50He's a terrific CEO. But if you look at TGX, can you put up a chart of TGX? Because we talked about the stand yesterday. Here's an actual stand chart. And this is incredible because when I was looking for 6%, it came in at 2%. And it is relentless, relentlessly down. I got a club meeting today at 12, and I got to do a mea culpa. TGX has been one of the greatest stocks I've had for the last decade. Well, Jim, mea culpa. I'm not sure anyone was counting on the conflict escalating from here. to your point about it no longer being temporal. I agree, but as someone who runs money, that's irrelevant.

4:20I mean, you know what? No one really did anyone game plan last night's game. Well, somebody actually did. Somebody was behind that game. And, you know, if you're New England, you can't just say, well, look, you know, it's that stadium. I mean, if we're playing that game, no, no. Yes, I see your point. But you really, you think the mouth of the river is oil. And you kind of sound like ECB today, which, by the way, not only hikes, but raises their inflation outlook for the next couple of years. I mean, look, I've been saying, I started the show last night, it's oil, oil, oil. It's oil against employment.

4:58And employment is good, and it's going to stay good, I think, because there's such demand. But I think that we are seeing through, I think the president needs to be more worried about the supermarket. Now, I think sometimes you do get the George Bush senior effect of going in how much is milk. I get yelled at about this stuff by my wife who says, how could you go on TV and not know that oranges are now eight bucks? How could you not know that milk is six? And the answer is, if you don't know, you're relatively clueless to what's happening. But as long as you have a job, maybe you can put up. Inflation is growing a little bit less than wages, but at the same time for the lower end.

5:34But at the same time, I look at these numbers and I just say, well, here it comes. And that's why all these discretionary stocks are going down. Here it comes. To your point about what Moynihan told you, let's take a listen to their conversation from Matt last night. They're borrowing. They're using the lines. The credit quality is good. They've figured out in a world where a lot of things are changing, they've figured out a path forward pretty much. They still worry about gas prices and how it affects product prices. But everything we see is fine. So when do you think that tone changes? Well, it's a great question.

6:09Look, if the Fed starts raising rates, maybe people stop their hiring plans. But we're in a robust—we're the president's right. We're in a robust economy. And you look at what's happening in data centers. They've made up for all the lost jobs in the city, which would have been— there's no big construction jobs going on in the country other than municipal and data center. So I don't know when it happens, but I will say this. If you look at the price of oil, which goes up appreciably every single day, it could happen by, like, I don't know, Thursday. Thursday next week. You can't have oil go up every day like this and not have someone say, I went to Casey's, Casey's General, which Casey's is a good store.

6:53There's 3 ,000 of them. You go to Casey's, you pump, and then you're supposed to get the breakfast pizza. But if you can't afford the breakfast pizza, you don't buy it. You just don't. And what's with beer? I mean, you could go to a convenience store and you buy beer. How did beer get too expensive? Beer too expensive for the working person? Given what we know about consumption patterns in beer these days. Unless people, you know, is all beer flat? No. Well, we did hear from Nestle this morning, Jim. They do blame the Middle East conflict on rising prices from their suppliers. And they are pretty plain about they're going to bring the consumer along with them.

7:28Yeah. I mean, look, it's just, it doesn't hurt if you're wealthy. And I can understand the current of that midterm where you have Federman there. And it's like, you know, we don't want the Democrats, the socialists, let's call them social Democrats. Like it's 1932 in a country that I like to talk about. But we're at a moment where there's going to be much more pushback because of these prices and many more candidates that advocate things that are not mainstream. How about that? Not mainstream. Not mainstream. You mean like price controls, government? Yes, I think someone said, I'm waiting for someone to say, I've had it with Valera.

8:08Valera makes too much money. The refiners have been called in for shaming sessions at the White House. Look, I think, yes, they have. But they haven't been told, lower your prices. I mean, it's not, we're not in a Nixon mode yet. But I think that the president is going to have to I think the president is sitting there just fuming about these prices because that's what's at stake. And you come up with a five thousand dollar figure that, you know, is is not possible. It's funny because if he had said eight hundred dollars, people might have been like, I mean, you need Congress to make these decisions, Jim.

8:44Yeah, I mean, there was a really interesting little notation in the Wall Street Journal today talking about how, let's not forget, he can't run again. I mean, why was that in there? Why did you write that? Why did you say he can't run again? How did that get in the story? Are people just saying that whole thing was about running again? That's what I'm thinking. That's what I'm thinking. They put in the term limited president. It's like, you know, maybe he reads the article and says, holy cow, I thought I had it. What was I doing with that presentation? We are within eight weeks of the midterms, and we're going to start talking a little bit more about it.

9:18Well, it's just that I do think that employment good, price is not good. The trajectory of the prices in the supermarket versus the previous week and the previous week and the previous week is way too high. Yeah. I mean, your point about transport, refrigeration. I mean, a grain combine uses like 25 gallons an hour of diesel fuel. That's true. By the way, Deerhead did have a good quarter. Agco was on yesterday. Not as good, but they don't have the same makeup. But I do think that, you know, let's put that price on. Let's tap that on. Now, if you have a company like Walmart, which is committed to lower prices, that means they're committed to a lower stock price, too.

10:00And they've accomplished that. Yes, they've gotten. Everything's on sale. Everything's on sale, including our stock. You can go there, you can buy a stock, you can buy a share next week at 105. By the way, we didn't even mention the principal increase in price that's right in front of us. The$3 ,000 Apple phone, no one's talking about. Not the$2 ,000, but the$3 ,000. You know, give me some terabytes. Whoa, terabitus. We're going to talk some Apple in a little bit. First, though, there continues to be buzz surrounding the warning from former anthropic and open AI researcher Jacob Coxon, that people building AI, he says, earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

10:39He made some rounds in the media talking to Fox and CNN. This is an exchange last night between him and NBC's Tom Yamas. I'm curious, when you were having these conversations at work or you're in some type of slack and you're having a chat about the AI models, are people saying, hey, I think this is of control. I think this could kill us all. Is there nervous giggling? I mean, what's happening? So the current models don't pose significant risk. This is all extrapolating potentially one year away from now. The models start getting very dangerous. We have to be very careful. One year away. Some people think even six months.

11:18Like it's plausible within six months, the models pose risk of taking over the world, the AIs. So now we have Paul Tudor Jones, Jim, with an op-ed in the journal saying the AI might be the world's third superpower and that she and Trump need to take it seriously. I first saw it. You know, the headline was AI may become the first superpower, but on the front page it was the third superpower. And I said, oh my God, Iran is a superpower. Now Iran is a superpower, but now it turns out to be AI. Maybe more dangerous. His point here is that you take the potential for mistakes in a model, multiply that times, he argues, tens of thousands of users, Jim.

11:58It's daunting. We've been talking a lot about it. Although, Brad Gerstner and David Sachs on X in the past 24 hours call it basically hyperbole. Right, and they're anti-China, which they're in the stop China mode. Nothing the matter with that. I would say that maybe if there were liabilities, I mean, you read this thing, anthropics have these things come out and they know it. Well, why doesn't someone sue them for$100 billion? I mean, really, at this point, you have to say, you know, you're doing this? Well, I'm going to tell you, you want to think that you can just play with us? Here's what we're going to do.

12:31You want to slow this thing down? Go to the courts. They'll slow it down, but good. What does that do to an IPO? Well, I mean, I expect an IPO in the next six weeks. Yeah. Well, I just think you can't just expect it. This is just free money. You've got it. Someone has to pay. If you make these companies pay for what they're doing, they are capitalist. They're not democratic socialist companies. They're capitalist companies. You go, if someone actually is hurt and they don't have the insurance coverage, well, they're not going to come public at$2 trillion. It doesn't work like that. I think there needs to be a monetary setback to these companies for them to realize, because they don't seem to care about anything else.

13:17So you, hmm. No, I'm trying to figure out, I'm not trying to figure out how to stop them. I'm telling you what will stop them. I mean, I'm thinking judicial friction. We're going to talk about policy friction in the Senate and in California with Governor Newsom. Power bottlenecks. And then the safety discussions that we're having now in the open. If someone's damaged, which people are, and they don't, I mean, Huggy Face was damaged. Why not sue them? Why not just go hire, I don't know, Latham and Watkins, which has its own NVIDIA servers. Yes, I saw that. I'm like, man, and they're developing their software.

13:53They don't want open AI. They don't trust open AI. But why not just go after them and just see how they act after that? Because that changes behavior. You may say, listen, we like unfettered science. But what changes behavior is having to pay a huge amount of money because you unleashed things that you knew were bad. Yeah. Well, not apples to apples, but would you put that in the meta? type of school where you settle for what you would argue I think would be a bargain. Well, there were people who thought it was going to be$100 billion. There were people who felt that maybe... It reminded me of the concussion trial of the NFL, where I think the NFL is willing to give them a couple of teams, but they settled for like$800 billion and they had to go up.

14:38I think that this was a great win for META because the existential crisis was taken off the table. More important, once the AGs, the state's general, had to do that settlement, all the private injury lawyers, all the big guys decided, hey, you know what, we're not going to go after Meta because unlike, say, ovarian cancer J &J, each one of these cases is different. Each person is different from what happened. It costs too much money to bring each person. If everyone had the same level of psychosis, they would just sue them. But now they really can't, and that's why the stock's got 100 points. That's about why it's not about 100 points, but I like Muse.

15:13I like Muse a lot. Well, so does J.P. Morgan. Yeah, maybe I'm looking at a good fish around a Muse. Thank you very much. But because then I don't have to use Amazon, which is, you know, and Alexa. Supped up Alexa. Beethoven, Beethoven, Wagner. Come on, learn their names. There's only a couple of greats. We're going to talk about the upgrade over at J.P. Morgan as they go to 820 on Meta. I love that. I love that. And I like a lot of things to do. Also, the reaction to Apple's product unveilings yesterday, including the foldable iPhone duo, as Jim mentions. futures here trying to find some legs here as oil is stubborn and ppi really doesn't bring us a whole lot of relief back in a minute ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter that's why understanding your treatment options matters discover what's possible with trimfaya guselcomap trimfaya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur.

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17:00See discover.com slash 5 for details. This holiday, all plans, even unlimited, are just$15 a month. A holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song, like All I Want. Right. Okay, we can afford that. You know what? Forget the music budget. We're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for a 12-month plan required,$15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy.

17:34See terms. Apple's moving higher in the pre-market a day after hosting that product launch event. It's first under John Ternus. The company highlighted its foldable iPhone Duo with AI capabilities, a starting price of about$2 ,000. You also have the new iPhone 18 Pro and Max getting about a$100 hike over last year's model. I got to know, Jim, what you thought of the folder, the folding phone. I thought it was a well. I didn't expect a well. I've seen other foldable before and why I didn't want it. I want to, you know, we talked about price, and I was making fun of that one, the$3 ,000. But there is, when I check around, one of the things I have to recognize is this, which is the$17.

18:11You're getting$900 for it in a refund. So you look at a price of$2 ,000, it's actually$1 ,100. Yeah. And this is a good, you know, really great machine. And I cannot believe how much they've held value. These are not like cars to get off the lot. So I think that we should start thinking about a different kind of price, which is the trade-in price, which is what you would think of if you go to a car dealer. You say, oh, that's a$40 ,000 car. I'm going to trade in my$30 ,000 car for that. I think that this is not as unreasonable as I thought, given the fact that DRAMs are up so much. They contained it.

18:42But there was a lot of wow factor. And what's amazing, Carl, is that we thought everyone had seen it. It's pretty remarkable, Jim. And to your point about upgrades, Stanky of AT &T talked with David about that at Communicopia yesterday. Take a listen. We used to see devices replaced every 24 months. Now it's closer to 36 months. That's an artifact of price goes up, demand gets moderated in a little form. I expect we'll see a little bit of that happen. I don't think anybody's going to be out there subsidizing a$2 ,000 device for free. Well, not for free. I want to go and see what Costco does. I mean, I'm always amazed when you get the T-Mobile and Costco combination, and you feel like you're on the spot and you just want to just change it.

19:30When T-Mobile didn't have the covers that it has now, there was an explanation. And now T-Mobile is just an aggressive capitalist. So I think Stanky was a real good interview. David's done an unbelievable job up there. I recommend the AMAT interview because that was really important in terms of DRAM pricing. But there was no doubt about it that there are ways to get this phone without paying what you're seeing. Yes. So your early impressions of Ternus, I mean, a lot of this got developed. undercooked still obviously that's a great question i think i think he doesn't want it to be about him he wants it to be about apple which is i like it's almost like you know imagine a game uh where an nfl game where it's about the coach and it's like that would be you know i did this i did that i did this and don't forget i did that and at the end of it we would all say we would call him like in a baseball now say he's out of here i mean you can't it's good he's embracing the company in a very humble way.

20:25I like that. This is a good presentation. Is Apple your favorite Mag 7 at the moment? Okay. No, meta is because I think people don't understand. I mean, I was very close to this lawsuit, and I know what the downside was. And they got away, I don't want to say with murder because it's too sensitive, but I cannot believe that the AGs gave in so easily. Yes. They rolled. They rolled over. Well, the JPMorgan upgrade today talks about Muse already, number three in the App Store, I think. That kind of traction at that scale is what takes them to 820. You don't disagree, obviously. I do not disagree.

21:00Look, 19 times earnings with a great growth situation. I think a lot of upcoming stuff, including that data center resolution, which I think is going to make it so they're going to be the data center of choice if you want to go some, you know, the big deal they have with energy in Louisiana is fantastic. So they just jumped ahead. Remarkable. We've talked about 600 being resistance and they've blown through it. No, I mean, this product is great, but the liability, I mean, believe me, there's a lot of sigh of relief. Not that they wanted it, it's just that the cases turned out to be, you've got the First Amendment, that they had some protection, it's free speech, but more importantly, it's really hard to figure out the damages, and I think the states were afraid that they would lose.

21:40Meta was afraid of it. Yeah, nobody knew what was going to happen. Nobody knew, but it certainly didn't come in at 100 bill. Kramer's Matt Dash on the opening bell. In just a few moments, take one more look here at the pre-market as we've got our eyes pinned on the 10-year. Anything above 492 would be the biggest weekly close going back to 07. Stay with us. The quarter pound of a cheese is made with 100 % fresh beef cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup, and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, all for$8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag.

22:26The Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal, now$8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. With the Discover Cashback Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5 % cash back at different categories each quarter on up to$1 ,500 in purchases. That's 5 % cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com slash 5 for details. Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi.

23:10Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get backroom play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Try it now for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful. Watching some of the laggards on the NDX today. There's CoreWeave, which has kind of been in this, I would say,$40 range for months now, Jim. Yeah, look, I mean, CoreWeave, they had a good quarter in terms of their credit rating. I gave it a good interview with Michael and Trader.

23:44But it's locked in a range, I understand that. Arm is just the first time it's really got hit here. Western Digital is DRAM. I'm surprised. That doesn't make sense to me. But there are people who are saying that there's a new product out there that is going to make it so it uses us memory. So efficient, yes. I mean, yeah, it comes every three days there's one. And Sanjay Miroja from Micron would tell you, yeah, go ahead. We'll get the opening bell in just a few minutes.

24:11Let's get to Kramer's Mad Dash countdown to the bell. Single mystery buyer. Last week, we had a series of buys on Friday. Gigantic call by Sandisk was gigantic. Bloom Energy, Intel, CoreWeave, Micron, SK Hynix, AMD. What do these all have in common? They're Leopold situational awareness names. So how can that be? Is it a copycat or is he back? Are you asking or are you suggesting? A lot of people are speculating that he's back. I think that someone's imitating him. But these are gigantic buys using flex calls. That's kind of what Situational did. Maybe there's a minute. Maybe someone's saying, you know what, we've got to be in these stocks.

24:50But you don't want to be in them today. I think that's if you see$315 million in total options. I want to know more. I want to know more about that. We're going to talk some explorations in the next few weeks here. Let's get the opening bell this morning. And the big board on Wall Street, it's Paysafe, a payments platform celebrating its 30th at the NASDAQ in Times Square. The Consulate General of Mexico commemorating its 200th anniversary. And at SIBO in Chicago, it's Beyond Investing, a firm focused on vegan and environmental conscious investments, celebrating the 7th anniversary of its first ETF.

25:26It's interesting ETF for younger people who care passionately. I care passionately, too, but I wouldn't want to make that investment. So we haven't been below 7 ,600 since August 3rd, Jim. Remember, we talked about those initial levels of August and how important they were. Well, you did say September, tough month. Yesterday, you put a figure out about 50-day moving average. It just took my breath away. The only thing we have going is we are oversold on the S &P oscillator, about minus four, which means close to where we would bounce. But this is such a binary market. When oil hit, I was wondering, what's about Intel?

26:04What's about this? No, it's just oil. No, you literally wrote this morning. You said, oil up. Not much to think about. There really isn't. There isn't. And I hope that, you know, does the president realize it? The president doesn't care. Maybe the president wants a win. I don't know. I just, all I can say is, is that it is the service economy. We are a service economy, and the numbers that react to a service economy inflation are going up. Against that, we have Charlie Scharf and Brian Moynihan saying that things are really good. I'm not going to disagree with that. I just think that at a certain point, you don't want to pay a huge amount of money for the things that you're buying at the supermarket.

26:37Yeah. Retail gas, I know we put up the graphic of AAA around$4.28. Two-day rise of about$0.17. So we haven't put two days together like that since April, thanks to Gas Buddy on that one. Well, isn't that a 20-gallon fill-up means no breakfast pizza? I mean, 20-gallon fill-up means maybe you're not going to want to buy a smucker Hostess Twinkie. It's correlative. It's correlative because people count their money, and there's no points. Maybe there are points. The points economy, maybe that's how you get a Hostess Ding Dong. And then you mentioned diesel. Just one more tidbit on that one. If you look at wholesale diesel, it would imply 615, 625.

27:24A 6 is essentially assured at this point. You just see a tack them on. Now, Amazon, look, everybody passes through all these. Amazon does have its own trucking fleet. But someone's eaten these prices, and some of it's going to the consumer. I did mention one way. I should have mentioned it in a more positive way. I think that this is their time to take on a Kroger. This is the time to take on the supermarkets. Because remember, Amazon's the second biggest food company. Amazon passed Costco. So they're in a war with Amazon. They're in a war with Kroger. And someone's going to have to lose. In the same way that someone had to lose in the drugstore.

27:58Maybe someone has to lose in the supermarket. Yeah. We mentioned you saw Nike yesterday getting into the 36s. Nike is. American Eagle Gym, with that comps miss, was down 14 pre-market. Well, you know, there was a bogey. They did 6 % gain. I mean, this is American Eagle. It's a fast-growing company, and that's not fast. The expectations here have been very, very high for them. I've been saying the same thing about Lulu. That's a totally suboptimal situation. You think the tone changes with Oracle tonight? I've never heard Oracle ever say a bad thing about Oracle. You know, the implied move's like 15 % or something.

28:42You know, that's OpenAI. Yeah. And so a lot is riding. If they have a good number, suddenly you're going to start hearing, well, maybe OpenAI is going to be just as fast as Anthropik. It's been argued that because of their leverage, their cash flow, a few other things, that if you were to get a more cautious tone from a hyperscaler, they might be first. Wow. It would be, let's put it this way, it would be shocking for them to be cautious because even when things are unbelievably bad, they are anything but cautious. True. By the way, they have a conference call. If you want to feel good, let's say you had a hard day.

29:21Don't ask a question. Go home, listen to the Oracle conference call, and you're going to hear about the greatest thing ever. If they sell that medical records company that they bought, then you really have the greatest thing ever. I just think that they're not capable of saying things that they just can't. It's really rather amazing. I know Saprokat's former CEO was very upbeat. And look, look, I remember there was a moment when Frank Reich was quarterback for Buffalo, and they were in a very big comeback game, and they were down by 27 points. He walks in to the locker room. He says, we got him just where we want him.

29:58That's working. We'll find out tonight. We got him just where we want him. That's going to be good. That's what you're going to hear from the world. In the meantime, it's a little more defensive open here. Hershey's in the top 10 S &P years. It's that kind of market. You know what else is up, Jim? Dow, Lionel, Bungie. We're watching the Red Sea today, not just Hormuz. I mean, they're getting that. They're very advantaged by that. If you wanted to make a profit off that and you didn't want to have as much risk, you do buy Enterprise Product Partners, which is the natural gas liquid largest in our country.

30:32Yields 5.6. And, you know, that would be a terrific play, particularly if you want to just go long term and make a great compound. By the way, in terms of great compound, Enbridge buys Tollgrass oil, a terrific deal. And it's down$1.80 because people feel, I think, that they probably have to finance with stock. That's 5.7. I'm looking for yields that exceed 30-year that have a pretty steady stream. And Enterprise and Enbridge do. Dow obviously not. That's a facade. Well, that's interesting because a while back when the 30-year did get around these levels to 5.3, you're like, that's a good price.

31:06Yeah. I'm in. I would take that. You still feel the same? I have. Yeah. Yeah, I have. I mean, remember, look, my father worked until he was 92, okay? He had a really great month before he died. He was a salesman. So, I mean, I'm buying. I went 30 or so. He's running my hour. Yeah. Yes. Yardini suggests that the best input is pretty solid, and I think he thinks that this would be a reasonable buy because he doesn't really see the long yields going much higher than here. Although the tape's rife with stories about how the market's calling Besson's bluff. I just think that the market looks at someone who says those things.

31:47It says they're the house. It says basically that they're unbeatable. You can bet against me if you want. And they have to. That's what they do. They just go in to see if they can beat him. I mean, does Stan Druckenmiller come on and drill him? I don't think. What was Bestin's? What was Bestin's? How were his numbers when he was not the House, when he was head from the House? Oh, on his AUM? Yeah. At Key Square? No, his own. How was his portfolio? Oh, he had several losing years. What was his return? He had several losing years. Was he the House? And his AUM declined over time. I mean, I think that's widely known.

32:23I'll tell you who the house is. The house is a casino or it's Toll Brothers. It's not the Treasury Center. Well, it's funny you mentioned some housing, Jim, because mortgage rates yesterday, 30-year fixed, 685. It's going the wrong way, man. The XHB, it's down 20-plus percent from the highs of a couple of years ago. And it's hard to imagine that the refi market gets much leverage here, given the spread between the effective mortgage costs. All the numbers are going to be bad there. But thank heavens we are a strong country with great employment. Because when you see these things, you know that housing is 10 percent of the economy.

32:56But it reverberates through retail in a lot of ways. I mean, home goods are still very strong for TJX. How long does it stay very strong if we continue to have fewer trades? How is RH going to do when you have fewer trading? Here I'm thinking about trading of homes. And the answer is not well. So, you know, RH is down 21 percent. Look, we need the sectors that I look at that are good. Oil's good.

33:25Throw me a sector over there. Well, you're right, Jim, because there have been a lot of days this year where if there was one sector, it was green, and there have been a lot. It was energy. It was the green one. It's Mike Wirth. Yeah. I mean, good for him. Good for him. There's a look at Chevron and the XLE. Look at that. What a chart. You know what else is interesting, Jim, today is copper and Freeport. Reuters has a piece that they might be waffling a bit on copper tariffs, just given the already existent inflation concerns. Yeah, I have to believe when you listen to the Marvell, when you listen to a courting and you got this tariff issue, copper is going to be phased out of the data center much more rapidly.

34:09You've been saying this for a long time. Well, this was the quarter where they were talking about it. And this was the quarter where they talked displacement. because of the latency problem. And it made me feel like, OK, you want to be in copper up here at a higher, at this huge multiple, when you've got really brilliant companies like Corning and Marvell saying, listen, it's time. Now, inside the actual chip, no. But all the connections are copper, and that's being ripped out and fiber's coming in because fiber burns less, and you've got to have it, and it goes faster. So something that's faster and burns less is going to be a big increase over coffee.

34:43And that's why you've been relatively bullish on Fiverr, Corning, Coherent, others? These are good. They're good, yeah. And I cut them back because I'm so, I am worried that the data center companies are going to blow it. Remember that we have the elections coming up. It's really important that once the elections are through, Texas comes back because it's welcome, welcome home. But they have to win. I mean, you know, if the Republicans lose, then the data center is going to go to, we just saw the 200th anniversary of Mexico. There's this place called Coretora. And Coretora is a fantastic airport.

35:16It's got all the right fantastic labor. Well, that's assuming we don't declare a trade war on them, I suppose. We haven't really talked a lot about Canada this week and some of the import. Literally, now we're talking import bans, Jim, as you know, on motorcycles, beer, whiskey, along with 50 % on cheese, steel, some other stuff. Well, you know, steel, I think we need to protect that because the Nucor, a great company. But Mexico, the trade that we do in Mexico is gigantic and it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the pace of it's getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And in my Mexican context, we're saying, why does he hate Shainbaum?

35:53Shainbaum has done everything he wanted. And I said, well... You did yesterday? Yeah. And he said, well, he doesn't... He's not a fan. And, you know, the tamale tomato line, sometimes these things matter. 51st state, tamati, tomato. You say tomato, I say tax. On that point, Jim, we're watching the autos. Did you see this interview with Farley in the Journal? Responding to DOT and their concerns about Chinese inputs. I was shocked. I mean, I talked with Jim. I think Jim is terrific. And Jim would tell you over and over again, look, stop picking us. We're the ones that have the most employment. Our cars have more American than any other.

36:33And look, Jim Farley's straight, seven times earnings. Jim Farley's straight on this stuff. And he's done a lot of, he's done a lot of documentation about who has what. And I feel that he is wronged by us. TSM, Jim, with some August revenue numbers up 53. Stock's still not green. See, it's funny. I saw that first. Got up and saw that. Working on my speech, 12. I got up just in time to see the interception. But when I saw these numbers, this could be a good day. And then I saw SK Heinex trading in Luxembourg. I saw SK Heinex trading overseas, and it was just horrendous. And I said, well, I guess it's going to be an oil bill.

37:17Yeah. And then people are saying, again, that DRAM prices are going to level off. I don't know how that's possible. So did you say you have a club meeting today? I have a club at 12. So can you hint at some of your highest conviction buys? Yes, yes, absolutely. One of them did move from 89 to 106 in a straight line before I could have my meeting, which is Intel. And I think you're getting an unbelievable opportunity with Intel, provided that the president doesn't dump the giant state. Because then you have 400 million shares. I mean, it'll be a lot of shares. But I think that Intel is the CPU component is as strong as ever.

37:59We have robots coming, autonomous cars. Those are all CPU, not GPU. Intel can raise price. And we haven't heard from LipButan at all, but I think he's doing, we're waiting to hear proof of concept for his foundry for a very large customer that has a foldable phone. Yes. Ah, because we've been curious about customer, more detail on customer profiles. You don't have to say their name if you're in the business, but that company wants to see that foundry work, and then I think that company makes a beeline. And you've got a good chance now that Intel's coming back in, because Intel has not given an Intel rally off the bottom.

38:36It's really extraordinary. And by the way, that's a Leopold bottom. So you'd put Meta Intel on a list? Yes. Don't you have to listen to the call to get some on the list? Anything ex-tech? I guess I don't want to get it. Don't give it all away. You're right. No, I do. A bank of New York, which is now BMY. I want a bank that doesn't have, that has growth without credit risk, because we're going to be worried about credit risk soon, even though I do. You think so? Despite what Moynihan and Scharf said yesterday? Absolutely. But if oil goes straight up, I don't know how you keep that forecast, because there's so many people who have to pay a higher price.

39:12And I think that that makes people worry about credit. And if you want to see that, we also own Capital One. And Capital One yesterday was down badly when all the banks were up. And it's down badly again today. And that's just a proxy for credit. We consider it a canary a bit on credit risk. Yes, unfortunately. We're up nicely. I just don't want to have to give it back. A lot of people are selling Affirm. I think that's a mistake. His credit losses are nil. But it doesn't matter. Affirm is a good chart for credit. It's interesting. I mean, you look at a chart of delinquencies in aggregate for autos, some credit card, and they are up and to the right.

39:54But we're just not hearing it from Amex and B of A. It's not big enough. No, and Amex, definitely not. I thought they had much better numbers than people thought. I don't know if the stock sold off. I'm just predicting. And the thing that makes me feel that way is a company like TGS, the steadiest company on earth, or a company like Walmart, which was selling at$130. And I just think you look at Walmart and you say, okay, they want to keep prices low. This is what happens when you try to keep prices low. Your stock goes from 135 to 106. They're doing the right thing, and they're going to win a lot of customers, but they are probably eating much more of this margin than anybody else's.

40:33The TJX or the Walmarts of the world, yes. Yeah, TJX was just plain old horrible execution. Yeah, I mean, you would throw Burl and Dix and RH and a few other names in that list. Dix was just amazing. They bought that poison pill of Foot Locker. Mary Dillon fixed that company enough to be able to attract a buyer. I think we all felt that Ed Stack and Lauren Hobart would know that there's other things wrong with the footwear industry. That industry is way out of whack. as we know from the Nike underway to work in Stanley, which is pretty shocking. Cool. Per our conversation about safety concerns and AI, you did talk to George Kurtz last night?

41:16Well, I talk to him all the time, and George has got a solution. He'll tell you, I have a solution, which is Falcon. He unveiled it, and I think it does work. But obviously, when you read these things, it sounds like there's nothing. He was at Communicopia with David. Yeah, there you go. Just fantastic. I think we have a little bit of sound racked of what he told David at the Goldman Conference. Take a listen. Now the new apex predator is the agent state, right? And they're not at your perimeter. They're on your payroll. So we're actually, think about this, corporate America, everyone is letting them into their own environment.

41:50And what happens afterwards, they're having a hard time controlling it. So I think from the standpoint of how you get in front of this is you have to have the right level of AI and focused on security activities. Yeah, well, see, George is the first person who told me about this insurance issue that I alluded to when it comes to the lawsuit. Remember, Dario, whom I respect greatly, was saying, listen, we can do this kind of ourselves, but you can't. And you can't because of the insurance issue. So if you're trying to protect yourself from this, you have to get insurance because the insurers has to go sue Anthropic in order to be able to get the money back if this happens.

42:27And I know that George or a bad actor who you're not going to be able to catch. catch. But that's why that stock's up. The stock's been down for a while. Look, I think that Anthropics is great and OpenAI is great, but I think the plaintiff's bar is really great, and they tend to get their man. They do tend to get corporates' attention over time. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. And great companies like J &J, who had to pay a lot of money to get out of talc suits where there was no evidence that they had a specialist. Watch bonds today. Yield's really not giving up much ground here. 10 years, still around 492.

43:01We got PPI out of the way. Some of the internals are a little firm, reading into PCE. But, of course, CPI tomorrow will give us a little more information about what the Fed may do this month. Stay with us.

43:15A little weakness in chips today. There's a look at the SMH month to date, trying to hang on to some green for September, despite some of the challenges that the market's obviously handing with some aplomb, as we're not that far from 7 ,600. Right, and we're only a couple percent off it. The president watches the Dow more than the S &P, but we're not down enough for him to do something else. We will get Stop Trading with Jim after a short break.

43:42It's time for Jim and Stop Trading. Look, yesterday I had Charlie Morrison on. He took Wingstop from, I don't know, he tripled it, quadrupled it, and then he toppled it. J Mike, Jersey Mike, a lot of the brokers liked it today. I had him on the show. This is one where he's going to double the number of franchises in America and then has a huge overseas. There aren't any. If you want a company with very little credit risk that has very good growth, that has a low-priced sandwich that is going to travel overseas well, think about Jersey Mike. J-M-K-E, they're moving a lot of their advertising from TV to digital and it's having a good pickup and it's much cheaper.

44:21They were spending a huge amount on TV. Don't worry, Danny DeVito and Eli Manning will still be their spokesman. Yes. We had him here on the floor the day of the IPO. That was exciting. Yeah, the ads are well known. Two nice guys. All right, so club meeting at Newt Eastern. Yes, and I'm going to have some positives because I don't look. If we're getting more and more oversold, look, does the president just stand there and just say, you know what, we're going to let oil go to 110? That's not a style. It's just not. It just hasn't been. So we'll see. I don't want to be too negative, but there's a lot of things going wrong in the market, but not in the real world.

44:53Yeah. I can't imagine you would be a proponent of, say, an export ban. What that would do to domestic production. None of that stuff works. You don't go against the treasury market. Look, we want fair markets, not free markets, because that means China can crush us. We want fair markets, and we don't want rigged markets. And I think that anyone who's trying to rig a market, so to speak, I think that they have asymmetrical bad information. It's such a thing to have asymmetrical bad information. I would tell Besson that when you have a queen and a six, that's called a losing hand. Jim, look forward to the meeting.

45:30Everybody should pay attention. That's coming up at noon Eastern time.

45:35You've been listening to the opening bell on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

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