Talks with Iran, a Call with the President, & Energy Prices 3/23/26

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1:06On today's episode, developments on the war in Iran. A Truth Social post turned energy prices around and around this morning. President Trump writing that strikes against Iran's power plants are postponed in light of productive conversations with Iran. The futures are spiking on that Truth Social post from the president. Then, direct from President Trump to our own Joe Kernan. You heard some of it on the speaker. I did. The president's comments on his talks with Iran. Great meetings, great conversations, and hopes that within the next five days, something very substantive can be arrived at for the end of hostilities.

1:47Then, Iran's news agency telling Reuters, citing a source, that there are no talks. with the U.S. A market take from Allianz chief economic advisor Mohamed Alerian. The next five days are going to be critical in seeing whether you could hold the thing together pending these behind closed door negotiations that we've just learned about. And the military operations at play with former national security official in the Trump administration Richard Goldberg. He offers one of many ways to interpret this morning's news. This is a way to continue to buy more time, knowing he has one, two, three weeks of targets remaining.

2:27Plus analysis from CNBC's Dan Murphy, live in Dubai. Senior Emirati officials have told me in the last few days as well that ultimately Tehran's strategy has failed here because this has brought the Gulf states closer together and ultimately will bring them closer to the White House. It was a busy news morning and we're bringing you the story as it unfolded on our airwaves. It's March 23rd, 2026. The market's certainly remaining on a knife edge here. And Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in 3, 2, 1, cue it please. Good morning everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square.

3:15I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan. Andrew is off today. If you check out energy prices this morning, WTI is at 98.98. It's up about three quarters of a percent this morning. Brent is the one that everyone's watching, though. It's up one percent this morning to one hundred and thirteen dollars. Thirty one cents. Last week, WTI was actually down slightly over the course of the week. Brent was up significantly and continues to climb. Goldman Sachs raising its oil price forecast this morning. It says it expects Brent crude to average$110 a barrel this month and next month. That is up from a previous$98 forecast.

3:53It sees WTI averaging$98 a barrel this month and$105 a barrel next month. This is all bleeding over into precious metals, trying to figure out what happens with some of these things. Last week, gold was down by almost 10 percent. This morning, it's down another almost 7 percent to$4 ,255 an ounce. Silver is down by about 8.5 percent this morning. Platinum off by 10 percent. Today alone, a palladium down by 5.25 percent.

4:23About an hour after our show started with those energy prices, the president made a market-moving post on Truth Social. Here's Joe getting that news.

5:01I'm going to read this from the president. We'll continue throughout the week. I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for a five day period. Subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions. Thank you for attention to this matter. President Donald J. Trump. Obviously, the market's reacting with some relief over that. We've been looking at the potential for strikes and then other strikes coming on. The Dow futures, if you're listening on the radio, are up by 930 points. Let's look at the other markets.

5:37NASDAQ futures up by 460. S &P futures up by 140. We see oil. Wow. That's a decline of 12.7 percent for WTI, which is all of a sudden back at 85.75. It had been trading at$98 plus this morning. Keep looking at the other markets. Brent is down by 13.5 percent to$97. It had been at$113 before we saw this. Natural gas is off by two and a third percent. Arbob gas down by 7.8 percent. How about interest rates, gold? And the Treasury yields. Love to see it on the screens here. I would have been ready with all these. Yeah, obviously, this is some huge news. We're still running the ticker at the bottom of the screen.

6:16A thousand points, though. Ten-year is at highest levels since last July. That's no longer the case because it's down to 433. The two-year is sitting at 382. So you are seeing a collapse in yields here, just as you're seeing a sharp increase, a spike in the equities and a big, big drop in oil and energy prices. Cue the taco scuttle from the left and from Democrats, because that's I don't know how long it will take us to see that, because they're not happy when the war is going on there. They won't be happy when it's over. Let's get to Mohammed Al-Aryan. What are your thoughts, Mohammed? We saw we were down 250 on the Dow.

6:54Futures were now up a thousand. points. It's an important turnaround, because we were seeing flight to cash as the only safe haven, and that was contracting markets in a significant manner. The big question for me right now is not only do these talks continue constructively, but can you get Israel to buy in as well? Because there are three warring parties in this war. So there's a lot of uncertainty still, but it's much better for markets than what it looked like just 10 minutes ago. Hey, Mohammed, the idea that Israel would move against the United States at this point, I think they've been surprised and thrilled that the United States has moved in lockstep to support their goals to this point.

7:41I would have a hard time imagining that Israel would do something that the United States is saying they don't want to do anymore. But I will say the complexities here, what Iran had been floating that it wanted are going to be very hard to deliver. They said things like they want the Strait of Hormuz to now operate very differently in the future, that they would like to see everyone have to kind of buy into getting approval from Iran to go through, which I know the Gulf States are not going to go along with. And they want to be assured that they will not have any strikes that come against them in the future.

8:15And I think that's a nearly impossible admission for either the United States or Israel. So I guess the details, as always, will be what decides this, but the market is very quickly reading that this is a huge step down in the escalation that we'd seen to this point. It is, especially if you stop the military attacks, as suggested in the president's to social. You know, political scientists have had enormous difficulty defining an off ramp that can attract two, let alone three parties to this war. So that's the complexity of it, is that the objectives of the three are not aligned. If the U.S. can force objectives, because right now the U.S.

8:57is the only one that can declare victory, the other two cannot declare victory. So if the U.S. can impose its will on the other two, then we have an interruption into something that went from simply disruptions to structural damage that takes years to fix. And as we got to structural damage, we started seeing tipping points in economic and finance. It's pretty amazing, Mohamed, because earlier, the first thing I saw on MarketWatch was investors need to know that they're counting on the talk of trade. It's not going to work this time. And this is exactly I mean, anyone short this market at this point now can can feel what a true squeeze is.

9:38What's weird about the text and the president's two social comments, Muhammad, every once in a while we heard the president say, yeah, Iran wants to make a deal. But we but then on the other hand, we'd hear him say there's no one left to talk to. They're all dead. So there couldn't be talks occurring. This was happening for the last 48 hours. Very good and productive conversations with whom? And what do you think it entailed? You don't know. None of us know at this point. And is it as substantive as you think the president is making it out to be at this point? We don't know. And you raise an important question.

10:18Who are we talking to on the Iranian side? Let's not also forget that as we've eliminated the top layers, command and control has been shifted down to the field, to field commanders who have a pre-existing order to take advantage of, quote, opportunistic targets. So can you control the ground? Can you control the field? There's lots of question marks. But what you see in the market is exactly what you said. People were short. They were positioned for a further escalation because of the 48-hour ultimatum that was given to Iran and the counter-threat of Iran and the fact that Israel started attacking electricity infrastructure in the Iran already.

11:00So they were positioned for an escalation. And suddenly you have the possibility of a de-escalation. And the market is reacting violently to that change. WT was at 98. So they went out on a limb, Goldman, and said, we think it'll be at 98 for the next month. But then they said for the month after that, 105. And I said, how can they how can you possibly make any determinations when you don't know what the next headline or two social posts could be? So we went from 98. Where are we now? We're 88, 87 right now. So there's no this totally depends on what happens on the on the ground between the United States and Iran for the near term.

11:43It does. But I would also add that we have crossed some important economic and financial lines. There has been long-term damage. Qatar announced last week that 17 % of its LNG production is taken out for a number of years. We've seen other infrastructure. Today, I have an FT article suggesting that the flow of funds from the GCC to the rest of the world is not going to be as ample. that provided$800 billion in the last four years for investments elsewhere, that may not be as ample because of the need to invest in your own country and fix your own country and protect your own citizen. So we are going to see quite a tale in terms of the economic and financial implications that the market is yet to fully price in.

12:37Mohammed, watching these moves, obviously, this is the idea that, OK, we're not facing a deadline that comes tonight. But President Trump likes to move far more quickly than traditional political moves take place. he's extending a five-day window to negotiate all of this, which gets us either to Friday morning, if that is five days from now, or till Friday evening, if that's five days from the existing deadline tonight. We could be setting ourselves up for a potential reset of everything this coming weekend if those talks don't move as quickly as he would like to see over the next five days. If not before.

13:20So what happens in the next five days if whatever central command is left in Iran cannot control the field commanders? What happens if Israel doesn't follow the U.S.? So a lot can happen in the next five days, let alone what happens in five days. So it's going to be really an uncertain period. And, you know, asymmetrical wars, you've heard this on the air so many times, asymmetrical wars are really hard to end, especially when you have multi-parties to it. So the next five days are going to be critical in seeing whether you could hold the thing together pending these behind closed door negotiations that we've just learned about.

14:01All right. And do we say goodbye to Mohammed? We'll see you, Mohammed. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod. I just spoke to the president. Breaking news from President Trump directly to our Joe Kernan. This is the president's take on that, insisting that its regime change. Then a conversation on what's left to do militarily with former Trump White House National Security Council director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. It's Richard Goldberg. The United States and Israel came into this operation with a defined target set. We understand over the weekend, if you were to measure that, it looked like we were over halfway, but halfway means another three weeks potentially of targets to go through.

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16:22You are listening to a very newsy Squawk Pod. About an hour and a half into our show this morning, we got more news direct from President Trump. Here's Joe Kernan. I just spoke to the president. President Trump said the discussions had been very good over the last 48 hours, very intense discussions. I said, well, with whom? I thought, you know, there aren't a lot of leaders left alive. He said they have representatives. Obviously, that's been one of the things that that Iran has tried to say, that we've got a structure more than any any one person. The president went on to say or insist that this is regime change because it's totally different people that were involved in the last regime.

17:11I would imagine some of the people are the same. This is the president's take on that, insisting that it's regime change. I want to say the great meetings, great conversations and hopes that within the next five days, something very substantive can be arrived at for the end of hostilities. So you heard you heard some of it on the speaker. I did. You just had him on. Look, this is significant. We saw the huge jump in the futures. We were as high as 1175 almost instantaneously on the down. Now it's up close to a thousand. S &P futures up by 133. We saw oil prices collapse on this potential news.

17:54First of all, it's President Trump removing the deadline from tonight for the power for the strikes that they were going to do. For additional hostilities. For additional hostilities and strikes that he threatened for the utilities in Iran. Iran came back and was threatening to go after desalination plants and other infrastructure plants in the Gulf states. That could be some of what we're watching and kind of seeing what happened with this. But putting that off for five days, that gives you a lot of room. No, he was obviously in a rush. Rich Goldberg, you served in the first Trump administration as the National Security Council director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction.

18:34What does this mean for the straight? I guess we don't really know at this point whether there's an agreement from Iran to cease and desist on making it impossible for traffic to flow through. Yeah, I think my key question is going to be where are we at in the actual military mission? The United States and Israel came into this operation with a defined target set. And we were told that would take four, potentially eight weeks to clear the target sets. Those were military missions to degrade both the external war-making capabilities and the internal war-making capabilities against the people of Iran.

19:11We understand over the weekend, if you were to measure that, it looked like we were over halfway. But halfway means another three weeks, potentially, of targets to go through. So are we prematurely potentially pulling the plug and leaving the RUMP regime in place without having fully degraded its military capabilities, both externally and internally? that will be a question mark. But here's the deal. The president hasn't stopped operations. The Israelis are not stopping operations. I think what happened over the weekend is, in masterful form, we've seen him do this multiple times, he built up the market to maximum risk premium expectations.

19:49And he has now maximally collapsed those risk premium expectations with maximum deflation. And there could very well be very intense dialogues with somebody. We've seen reports over the weekend that the Qataris are racing around trying to broker something. They have not been successful in the past. But I look at the force posture. I look at the continuing operations. I look at the expectations of how much longer we needed to get to the end of our target sets and whether the president is going to be satisfied, particularly in the nuclear domain, which we don't talk about a lot. if this is his pathway to get the 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium out of Isfahan down in those tunnels, or if this is a way to continue to buy more time, knowing he has one, two, three weeks of targets remaining that he really wants to get through, and this is more market management.

20:42I don't know if we were characterizing it at the bottom, Rich, that he says he could get regime change this week. That's not really what he said. and we heard... What he basically said was this is regime change and his view... with all different people. But he's paraphrasing that it's different people than... Right. I think he was making the point that anyone that you would have been dealing with a month ago that many of those people are no longer with us. I think that was the point I think what he was talking about with the hoping for some big... Something this week... Again, take that deco down.

21:18I don't think that's right. Hoping we get something this week, I think he was saying, suggesting in terms of some settlement with the Iranians is what I understood him to be saying. I think this is a framework at this point. I don't know how much is... Right. But Rich, let me ask you, if you're looking at the military objectives that they set out with, and then you listen to the rhetoric that's come from whoever is in the Iranian regime at this point, where they say what they'd like to, what they would insist, in terms of reaching some stalemate would be, first of all, they want the U.S. and Israel to promise that they are never going to come back and attack again, which I think is almost a non-starter, probably a non-starter period with both the United States and Israel.

22:01The second being that they want the Strait of Hormuz to operate differently from this point on. And basically, every nation is going to have to ask Iran's permission to be shipping anything through the state of Hamuz, which seems like another absolute nonstarter, not just for the United States and Israel, but for the Gulf states and anybody else who is moving things through there. Does that sound to you like those are impossible ideas to get any sort of settlement? Well, I think for the president, if you are going to say this was a successful operation, you'd have to be able to describe the end states.

22:35Does Iran have any ability to move forward with the nuclear weapons program? If the answer is no, and you've also accounted for the loose nuclear material that's trapped down in the tunnels or under buried rubble, then that's a good outcome. If the question is, can they produce ballistic missiles or cruise missiles, can they reload their stockpiles? And the answer is no, not for years upon years, based on what we've done to the industrial base. Very good outcome. A similar question on their drone capacity as well and their naval forces. You then come to the Strait of Hormuz. And I think that's the big question here.

23:11And that is, have you achieved an end state where Iran does not think, the rump regime does not think that they've won, that they have used their terror extortion to be able to control global energy markets and brought the United States to the table prematurely to end a conflict before they've run their full military target sets? If that's the perception on the regime side at the end of it, that's not good long-term stability for the Strait of Hormuz and for our economy, our national security. If, on the other hand, all of those targets are achieved and you're able to say to them, you can keep threatening all you want, we're reopening the Strait, we're able to do it on our terms, then you've actually left this regime pretty helpless with external threats.

23:58Then the only other question is, how many of the targets did you achieve on the internal repression apparatus and command and control to give the Iranian people that historic opportunity that the president promised them. Rich, what it sounds like is you're saying that there's not going to be some settlement that's reached, that basically they're going to be squashed and it's a take it or leave it sort of situation. That's not necessarily the message I got from reading the Truth Social or hearing what the president was telling Joe. Well, it's not my prerogative. The president's the chief negotiator.

24:28So if he's going to to negotiate some sort of an agreement that has some sort of a compromise and leaves external threat capabilities intact on the Iranian side in order to get the strait reopened. And who knows what the Qataris are offering to pay the Iranians as some sort of an appeasement price that's been reported as well. I don't think that's a good end state. I think the president knows that's not a good end state. And so I come back to the beginning, which is where are we at in the actual military mission? He's going to be asking General Cain, Admiral Cooper, have we achieved all the objectives?

24:58Have you reached the end of your target bank? Similarly with our Israeli partners, have you achieved the end of your target bank for all the strategic objectives, which we may very well support in concept, even if it's not our strategic objectives that our military is working after? If the answer is no, sir, we need another week. We need two more weeks. We need three more weeks. And the president needs to find out how to provide that space and maneuverability in the market to reduce those pressures that are on him to get to the end of the military mission. I guess if the one thing would take away from this that probably is responsible for that big move in the futures, Rich, is that they were talking.

25:38We were talking with Iran for the past 48 hours. I don't know if that really was something I guess we should have assumed that there's always some behind the scenes dialogue going on, but it got so heated on both sides, incendiary on both sides, that maybe that's what we should take away from this. Great discussions. They want very intent now. Trump and I guess we can assume that President Trump as well as Iran, they wouldn't be engaging in these discussions, I guess, if they didn't want some type of end to the hostilities. But beyond that, we don't know very much at all, Rich, but we appreciate your time.