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Squawk on the Street

SOTS 2nd Hour: Iran Flashpoints, Rate Hike Questions, & Super Micro's Smuggle Trouble 3/20/26

Squawk on the Street

CNBC

Investing, News, Business

4.0566 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Energy prices falling, stocks under pressure, and rate cut expectations wobbling to end the week: Carl Quintanilla, Sara Eisen, and Michael Santoli discussed the latest for stocks before breaking down what comes next with Truist's Chief Investment Officer - along with more on the Fed's next moves here according to one former Fed president. Plus: Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman joined the team with 2 flashpoints he says could force an escalation in the Iran war... While the former head of CISA gave his read on the implications for cybersecurity. Also this hour: details on the dramatic chip smuggling scandal slamming shares of Super Micro. Squawk on the Street Disclaimer

Transcript

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0:00.0

Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sarah Eisen with Carl

0:10.4

Kintania and Mike Santoli today. We are live from post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange.

0:14.3

David Faber is out. Coming up this hour, Council on Foreign Relations President Michael

0:18.7

Froman will join us with two flashpoints, he says, could force an escalation in the Iran war.

0:24.7

Plus, we'll talk to former cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency director Chris Krebs about the cyber threats from the war facing companies and agencies.

0:33.4

And details on the scandal rocking shares of chipmaker super micro this morning with that stock losing more than a quarter of its value, it is a wild story.

0:41.5

We are on Supreme Court watch this morning as we await a potential decision this hour on

0:46.2

the president's authority to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

0:49.4

We're going to get you those headlines if we get them.

0:53.0

In the meantime, journals out with a story a few moments

0:55.4

ago, Pentagon sending three warships and thousands of additional Marines to the Middle East,

1:00.9

felt like we took maybe a small leg lower on that headline, Mike. For sure. Yeah, we did sort of push

1:06.1

slower on that. Been this pattern, obviously, market sort of stays in position, at least being prepared

1:11.8

with one eye for something de-escalatory or some relief on oil. Didn't get it. The S&P kind of looks

1:17.9

like it wants to touch the hot stove, which is November lows 6520 or thereabouts. And we'll

1:24.0

see if that creates a little bit of a dam break to the downside or not.

1:29.2

We have this big expiration day, but so far the market's been trying to keep it somewhat contained.

1:34.4

All right, so what I'm watching, what I'm watching is rising yields and rising probability

1:39.3

that the Federal Reserve will not cut this year and may even hike.

2:21.6

I mean, that is starting to get priced in a little bit. Okay, I have this great chart. I'm going to walk you through the chart. The orange line on top is the Fed Funds rate. That's where we are right now. The little stair step down. Those are the three cuts we got last year. And as you can see now, it's like flatlining because the Fed's not doing anything. They're not cutting. They're not raising. So there's where we are. The blue line below it, that's December in terms of market pricing of Fed Fund's futures. And pretty much throughout the year up until like a few days ago, the market expected by December, we'd have lower interest rates than where we are now. See, it's lower than the orange line. So the market has been expecting cut. They expect Kevin Warsh to come in, start cutting, they expect inflation to come down, start cutting. But guess what's happening now?

2:26.5

Because of the rise in oil, because of questions about who's going to be fed share, the December

2:31.4

cut odds have gone all the way up to where we are now, taking out all chances of a cut.

...

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