Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk in the Street. I'm Morgan Brennan with Brian Sullivan and Dominic Chu.

We are live from Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange. Carl, Sarah, David, all are off this day after Christmas.

Coming up, Apollo's Torson Slok is here. He says the economy is in better shape than many people think.

He's going to explain why in just a few moments. And NVIDIA announcing its largest deal ever.

Buying assets from private company GROC, GROC with a queue, for $20 billion.

We've got a top chip analyst to tell us what this deal could mean for investors with shares of NVIDIA up 1.5% right now.

And China, slapping sanctions on 20 U.S. defense companies, also individuals.

We're going to give you insight into what this move says about quietly ramping tensions over Taiwan.

Let's start with what we're seeing in the market this Friday morning, though, with some

thin trading here and a mixed bag for the major averages with the S&P and NASDAQ, both up

fractionally and the Dow down about 15 points right now. But Torson's Sloc, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, is here with us at Post 9. It's great to have you here. Welcome. Thank you. So we just teased it. The economy is in better shape than people are expecting. Why? What are you seeing? What are you saying? Well, the list of bullet points of the tailwinds is just getting longer and longer. So we have the one big beautiful bill, which we'll literally start next week. That's good for consumers. That's good for immediate expensing for companies. We also have lower oil prices. We also have that the dollar has been going down. And finally, we also have that the trade war is now further and further behind us. So the list of reasons why you should be more bullish on growth just keeps on growing as we're looking into the next several quarters. I've heard the talking points that there's stimulus here in this economy, too, going to 2026, whether it's overt and explicit or not. Your thoughts? Absolutely. The one big beautiful bill helps on two different

fronts. It helps with immediate expensing for companies. So now you can do 100% write down

of your capital expenditures right away. That's not normally the case. You have to normally do that

throughout several years. The second thing that's also helpful is that we also have that the

consumers is facing now a lot of tailwinds because we get a lot of refunds in the beginning of this year because now you have a look back to 2025 and that will help also the refunds will generally be 50% bigger in 2026 than what they were in 2025. So both from the consumer side and from the corporate side and the fact that the trade wall is getting further and further behind us, it is all very helpful for growth.

You know, Torson, a lot of us on Wall Street like to read your daily notes out there.

You kind of juxtapose the markets next to what's happening with the economy.

Is the market where it is right now justified given what you think is a better economy that's

going to develop over 2026?

And how exactly does that give it more runway than what it already has right now from a valuation

standpoint?

Yeah, this is exactly the discussion for 2006 that the growth outlook, as we just talked

...