Good Wednesday morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sarah Eisen with Carl Kintania and David Faber. We are live, as always, from post-9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Today, Alianzschef, Chief Economic Advisor, Mohamed El-Alerian, will be with us with a warning about the market's fast-changing expectations around the Fed.

Plus, it's the stock story of the month. Alphabet hitting record levels this week, even as NVIDIA says,

it's a generation ahead of competition. Long-time tech analyst Mark Mahaney joins us to weigh in.

And in a key week for spending on travel and gifts, Moody's Analytics, Chief Economist Mark Zandi,

tells us why Americans are facing an affordability crisis and what can be done about it.

I do, though, have some good news on the macroeconomic front. Yes, we're catching up with all the

data, but the most sort of real time that we're getting is jobless claims, which is the amount

of jobless employment claims that

Americans file from last week.

And actually we had good news there, which was it was lower than expected and actually

matched the lowest level since February.

216,000 jobless claims filed in the week of November 22nd, better than the 225 expected.

So four-week moving averages ticks down if you want to smooth it over.

It continues to be the low hiring, low-firing economic environment.

And yes, there's been a lot of angst around the labor market lately with some of the alternative

data, the ADP data that we've been tracking

sort of on weekly job losses. But jobless claims, as filed by the states of Americans filing

for those benefits, continues to paint a picture of lack of layoffs. And it just continues with

this mixed picture that we are getting on the economy, some good signs, some not so good signs. I mean, continuing claims are still near a four-year-high. And Challenger layouts are up 60% year-on-year. I'm not sure how we can call that a no-fire environment. No, I mean, it's mixed. There are mixed reports on it. Challenger, first of all, has always tended to be a little negative,

but yes, I agree October was really bad in terms of those layoff notices. It's just, it's

not showing up in the weekly unemployment claims in terms of any kind of elevated number

of layoffs there. And I think that it jives with what we're hearing from companies, which

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