CNBC Squawk Box Interview (2025)

Summary

On October 6, 2025 — day six of a government shutdown, hours after the OpenAI–AMD deal broke — Paul Tudor Jones came onto CNBC's Squawk Pod with a big market call: it is 1999. All the ingredients for a blow-off are in place, he argued, and from a trading standpoint you have to position as if it were October 1999 — with "really happy feet," because the greatest price appreciation always comes in the twelve months before the top, and the end will be really, really bad.

The differences from 1999 make the setup more explosive, not less: then the Fed was hiking and the budget was in surplus; now it is cutting with a six percent deficit — a fiscal-monetary brew he dates to the early 1950s. His year-end horse race: gold, crypto, and the Nasdaq. He conceded on air that his May call for new lows had been wrong, invoked humility, and restated the 200-day moving average as his standard bearer. Beyond equities: sovereign debt is the biggest bubble, deferred but not defused by easing-cycle flows; leverage — margin debt plus leveraged ETFs — is his gauge of the coming speculative frenzy; and AI, which he would take up nine days later on stage with Dario Amodei, is a two-faced phenomenon with no one leading the ship.

Full Text

Machine transcript (YouTube auto-captions), punctuation lightly normalized; wording as transcribed. Recognition errors possible — see sources.yaml for provenance.

Bring in show music, please. Today on Squawk Pod, Paul Tudor Jones says a big rally is coming. It's like the Prince song. It's 1999. Party like it's 1999, right? The billionaire hedge fund manager once predicted the 1987 stock market swoon.

He says today everything is set for a surge in stock prices. It's a bit like Star Trek. We're kind of boldly going where no man has ever gone before. A massive Monday deal. OpenAI and AMD coming to terms that could have the Sam Altman led AI star take a 10% stake in the chip maker. Mackenzie Sigalos broke the news.

This is OpenAI committing to buying several generations of this tech and it is a leg up that AMD needed. And White House top economic advisor Kevin Hassett as the government shutdown hits day six. The Democrats need to come to the table, get the government open, and then if they want to negotiate over something, they can. Plus the rest of today's news that got us squawking. And Taylor Swift rules the box office. Swifties are everywhere.

Try wearing, you know, me going out in a Taylor t-shirt. Do you have a friendship bracelet on? It's Monday, October 6th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in 3, 2, 1. Cue, please.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq Market Site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick along with Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And here we go again. It's a Monday.

We did close at record levels for all of the major averages last week. Uh the Dow, the Nasdaq, the Nasdaq 100, the S&P 500, and the Russell 2000, the small caps. You're looking at the Russell 2000 seeing its eighth positive week just out of the last night. And then you had gold at another all-time high and closing in on the $4,000 mark. It's up about 1 and 1/2% this morning, $3,965 an ounce. Bitcoin continuing its recent upswing.

It hit a record over the weekend, too, above $125,000 over the weekend. Right now it's at And it's now day six of the federal government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse right now over federal spending, also reopening agencies in Washington. And speaking with reporters yesterday, President Trump saying that layoffs of government employees are now underway. That's a different message than we heard from the National Economic Council director, Kevin Hassett. He told CNN that layoffs would begin if the president decides that negotiations with Congress aren't making progress.

I think that if uh the president decides that the negotiations are absolutely going nowhere, then there you know, there will start to be layoffs. But I think that everybody's still hopeful that when we get a fresh start at the beginning of the week, that we can get the Democrats to see that it's just common sense to avoid layoffs like that. Democrats are pushing to include a permanent extension of the healthcare premium tax credits in a deal to fund and reopen the government. Republicans insisting a discussion over those credits should be separate and take place once things reopen. And we could see another vote in the Senate on all of this today. And we're going to speak with Kevin Hassett.

That's going to happen this morning. On this week's Squawk Planner, the government shutdown is likely to disrupt a few of this week's planned data points, including tomorrow's international trade numbers and Thursday's jobless claims, also wholesale trade on that day, too. The agencies that release those numbers have suspended data collection and they won't resume publishing it until the shutdown ends. The Federal Reserve is still set to release the minutes from its latest policy meeting on Wednesday. President Trump is calling on corporate home builders to ramp up construction. In a post on Truth Social, the president said the companies are, in his words, sitting on 2 million empty lots, which he called a record.

Trump said, "I'm asking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get big home home builders uh to get them going. And by so doing, help restore the American dream." Uh on X, federal housing finance agency director Bill Pulte said Fannie and Freddie uh would meet now with each of the big uh corporate home builders. >> does that work? Get them to move by doing what? Suggesting it? And Bill Pulte probably has some pull at Pulte.

Normally you'd say, you know, let the market take over. If there's demand, they'll build the houses. There is demand. So I don't know what the uh There is demand, but costs are up and prices are high. And so that's that's kind of where the rub is for some of these things. Even if you get mortgage prices down, the cost of construction, the cost of labor has all gone up.

Overseas, Japan's Nikkei average jumping by close to 5% today to a record high. The country's ruling Liberal Democratic Party electing a conservative, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader. A research note over the weekend saying that she is likely to ask the Bank of Japan to maintain its accommodative monetary policy. She could become Japan's first female prime minister. Gains for the Nikkei were led by real estate, technology, and consumer cyclical stocks. The yen also weakening to the psychologically important level of 150 per US dollar.

And France's new prime minister, Sébastien uh Lecornu, has resigned. This just weeks after his appointment. He was installed last month after several government coalitions failed to pass a budget. The yield on France's 30-year government bond hitting a 1-month high before retreating slightly. And the CAC 40 index slumping by about 2% on the news. Uh the euro also falling against the dollar.

Taylor Swift uh ruling the weekend box office. No, it's not déjà vu. The musician's uh one-weekend-only album debut event at AMC Theaters raked in $33 domestically and another $13 The 90-minute movie uh tied to the release of the 12th uh Taylor Swift album featured a music video for one of her new songs, uh some behind-the-scenes footage from the video shoot, and personal reflections uh from the singer. This is the second collaboration between Swift and AMC. In the theater chain distributed a film version of her Eras Tour concert that generated more than a quarter of a billion dollars at the global box office and took the crown as the concert film of all time. And I actually benefited from that.

I actually got a thank you. I was going to ask, were you behind this one, too? Yeah, that was it. Thank you. You're welcome. Not even a t-shirt?

>> You're welcome. Okay. I didn't even get a What do you say? I didn't get a t-shirt. I didn't even get a uh I orchestrated this and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. >> Was I No, yeah, right.

All I got was this I know, I didn't get a Actually I did get I do have some Taylor t-shirts, some merch. Try wearing, you know, me going out in a Taylor t-shirt. Do you have a friendship bracelet on? Uh I have uh I wore one to a concert once. I can't remember which one. I can't remember which one.

>> The two of us? Yeah. I mean, Becky, obviously, and I already have friendship bracelets. >> No, I just think it's I don't need a for you to know how I feel. It's that it's that it's that it's that deep. And then you've expressed similar Yes.

recently. Uh this is true. Coming up, uh more of today I this is eye-watering. Uh or I you know, doesn't take You You've You've explained that that doesn't take a lot for you. Well, I cry at car commercials. Tease will be next.

Coming up, let's make a deal. OpenAI has reached an agreement with chip maker AMD that could give OpenAI a 10% stake in that company. Our Mackenzie Sigalos with the headline that has shares of AMD skyrocketing. The company is projecting for 120 billion in revenue by 2030. And this is a big part of that strategy. And we are still in a government shutdown.

Kevin Hassett, the economic advisor with the president's ear, joins us from the White House North Lawn on the potential cost of Washington not doing business. It costs the US uh GDP about $15 billion a week for a shutdown. And so if the shutdown continues for a long time, then there's going to be a lot of things that don't happen and it will show up in the GDP number. So much more Squawk Pod is right ahead. Welcome back to Squawk Pod. Here's Andrew Ross Sorkin.

We do have some breaking news right now. I want to get straight to it. It's a new AI partnership and it is fascinating. Uh AMD's stock is surging. OpenAI and AMD getting together this after OpenAI, of course, uh doing a deal just a week ago, a week and a half ago, now with Nvidia. Uh Mackenzie Sigalos has the details on all of the what's happening here.

So, Andrew, OpenAI is teaming up with AMD in a partnership that could give Sam Altman startup a 10% stake in the chip maker virtually for free. Now, the rollout starts with 1 GW of AMD's Instinct GPUs in 2026 and expands to 6 GW across multiple hardware generations. Now, as part of this arrangement, OpenAI receives up to 160 million shares of AMD stock through performance-based warrants priced at just 1 cent each compared to AMD's current trading price of around $165. Now, those shares vest as deployments grow, but both companies are also billing it as a massive win for AMD, which has trailed Nvidia for years. It's also a clear sign that OpenAI doesn't want to be dependent on just one supplier. This is all about OpenAI locking in the supply chain that it needs to scale.

And it comes within weeks of cutting a $100 billion deal with Nvidia. It's also in talks to build custom chips with Broadcom and comes as OpenAI plans a trillion-dollar plus infrastructure buildout across chips, data centers, and custom silicone. It is a tightly wound circular economy and one that analysts fear could face real strain if any link in the chain starts to weaken. Guys? So, can we just discuss this is in many ways the opposite of Nvidia when Nvidia invested effectively in OpenAI. In this OpenAI is getting shares in AMD, but I also imagine OpenAI is going to have to pay for the access to these to these chips and these data centers that are going to have these chips.

>> OpenAI using Nvidia's funds to turn around and fund their competitor? >> Well, so that's that's an interesting element to it, too. But, the question is sort of ultimately where is all the money going to come from because even with the money that it's it's getting from Nvidia, for example, by my math, it still doesn't have all of this money. Yeah, great question. So, let's start with how it's going to pay for it. The $100 billion worth of equity that Nvidia is putting into OpenAI is also pegged to certain buildout milestones being met.

It's going rolling out in $10 billion increments per gigawatt. Now, that goes into a pool of cash that OpenAI can spend on anything that it wants to. It is not contractually obligated to give it all back to Nvidia. So, yes, ostensibly that could also go to AMD to buy their chips. And yes, they are buying the chips from AMD directly, which is separate to this equity arrangement. Now, in terms of how they're going to pay for it, yes, there is a huge shortfall.

Each gigawatt is roughly $50 billion. So, $35 billion typically goes to the chip maker, the other $15 billion is roughly what the data center buildout requires. Now, to pay for that, I was talking to Sarah Friar 2 weeks ago and she says that equity is too expensive to hand out. So, it's all about debt. And so, that $100 billion investment deal investment from Nvidia gives them leverage at the bank because they are not cash flow positive. And Andrew, well, I mean, your entire team has talked to Sam Altman about the fact that he has no intention of becoming profitable anytime soon because his goals are so ambitious and that requires additional compute buildout.

And so, where where ultimately do you see the money coming from? I mean, I hear you saying it's it's going to come in the form of debt. We obviously saw, you know, a company like Oracle take on I think $17 billion in new debt. We haven't seen Not Do We haven't seen classic debt being taken on, right, by um by by like OpenAI, for example. Not yet. But, the other piece of this, going to head pretty soon to DevDay, which is OpenAI's big event.

They're bringing in 1,500 plus developers. And that's another play here for them. Sam Altman is looking to monetize the tech that they have. So, one last week they had this e-commerce strategy announced where they're basically cutting deals with merchants to get a portion of transaction revenue. It's starting with Etsy. It's growing to Shopify.

But, this is an ambition that Sam Altman has talked about for a very long time. He brought Fiji CMO in house and she is someone who is just known during her meta days of being able to turn product into revenue engines. Now, it's not going to look the same as what she did at the social media giant, but she is trying to invent new ways to make money. You saw the Sora app. It's now number one in the Apple App Store. This is the video generation software tool and it's still highly gated, but there's a lot of interest there.

Altman specifically said this could also be a good monetization engine. But, I brought up DevDay because ultimately they want more killer apps built on top of OpenAI's bones because to your point, Andrew, they don't have enough cash. Debt I mean, they haven't taken on debt yet and even if they do, that's not going to be enough. But, the company is projecting for $120 billion in revenue by 2030 and this is a big part of that strategy. I mean, that is a staggering amount of market cap gain in AMD today. That's that's over $60 billion.

So, so much for Intel catching up. It it was coming back a little bit. It was 160 back to 170 billion. This takes AMD from 270 or so billion well up into the 300 billion plus range. That is that is an amazing move in one day for I mean, shareholders must be AMD shareholders are like glad that they don't have the Mondays, Mackenzie. They don't have the They don't They are they've got the Fridays.

But, this is a huge endorsement of their entire Instinct GPU line because this is not a one-off deal. This is OpenAI committing to buying several generations of this tech and it is a leg up that AMD They're going to 330 billion. Yeah. Is this I mean, you mentioned that this is them trying to diversify the supply I guess they've been doing that on every level trying to make sure that it's not just Microsoft they're reliant on. This has been their new strategy for a while. Yeah, I mean, that Microsoft relationship is a big part of how they unlock unlock that $40 billion tranche of cash in that SoftBank led round.

Now, they've got a term sheet. We don't know what that looks like because the Microsoft relationship, one part of it is commercial and so, we know that they would like to revise down that 20% revenue share that they're currently giving to Microsoft when they make enterprise sales. I've talked to Brad Lightcap, their COO, who's been leading their go-to-market team and that's scaled from up to 700 people in the last 18 months from a couple dozen. It's been pretty tremendous the effort that they've made on that front. Um but, separately to that, Microsoft, I mean, once their biggest investor or their biggest partner, listed them with the SEC as a key AI rival. So, we've seen this relationship evolve in the last Mackenzie, one of the things I'm trying to understand here is whether you believe, and maybe you know or don't know, I don't know the answer to this, whether Nvidia knew when it made this deal a week and a half ago now that or maybe 2 weeks ago that this was OpenAI has made no secret of the fact Sarah Friar openly talking about the fact that they plan to diversify their chip strategy.

I asked her in Abilene, Texas, whether or not that preferred provider language that they used used with Nvidia meant that they were exclusive. And she said, "No, we plan to use AMD chips." I mean, for weeks now they've been talking to Broadcom about building a custom chip that might lead to even more effective compute if it's designed with a proprietary model in mind that would fit with OpenAI's LLM specifically. So, I don't think that there's any secret that there that they were going to diversify. Now, I mean, someone who might have been more surprised was Microsoft when they heard about some of these compute buildouts because historically OpenAI was getting all of its compute power from Azure. And then they announced this $300 billion deal with Oracle and and that was the week that we saw the term sheet come from Microsoft and OpenAI, which is the thing that we were waiting for in terms of negotiating the relationship between those two partners. So, that would be interesting to me.

And I don't have the answer to that, but it's a question that I'm asking. Lots to unpack there. Mackenzie, thank you for for taking the initial stab. I'm sure we're going to talk a lot more about this. Day six of the government shutdown with no movement over the weekend. Our next guest says if negotiations continue to go nowhere, then perhaps layoffs will begin.

Join us now, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. Kevin, always good to see you. You too, Joe. Where where are we? I I don't believe this goes much longer. I could be wrong, but it's pretty clear that that the Democrats don't have a winning hand here and they're going to slough off another five uh near term.

I just worry more about what happens after we reopen the government and Republicans fold and bend and and wimp out because they're worried about the midterms on Obama on on the subsidies. Right. You know, I don't think that that's going to happen. I think people will negotiate. But, the bottom line is right now we just want a clean continuing resolution. And any government worker that loses their job because of riffs after another failure failed attempt to negotiate is going to be really there because the Democrats are being intransigent.

And don't forget, Joe, that this is the third time since President Trump was in office that they've decided to shut the government down. So, they've got Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don't really know how to govern when he's in the White House and they are just flailing about. And and this is really the worst of the three. They have absolutely no leverage whatsoever. And you know, one would expect that they would come and they would come soon to the table, but they keep not doing it.

You know, today the the Senate opens its gavel, I think, around 3:00. I expect they'll be a team of people in the Oval with the president hoping that we're going to get the government to stop being shut down. But, if not, then I would guess that that team in the Oval is going to start taking sharp measures. The one and a half trillion that that they'd like to to add during a reconcili- during a CR, a continuing resolution. That's not obviously going to happen. So, they they really want these these these Obamacare from COVID.

They want those extended. I just want to go over and maybe you can come up with what the Republican plan is. So, back before Obamacare, Republicans didn't want to talk about health care. That left a huge opening for Obama. 2010 came up with this what is really a mandate subsidy mess. I'm I'm quoting Kimberly Kimberly Strassel, which almost got repealed by a couple of physicians who led the way, Tom Price and Tom Coburn, but it didn't.

She says that spurred a return to the dark ages ever since 2017 where Republicans haven't done anything to try and fix the It's a So, these these bump ups that we're going to see have nothing to do with the expiration of these COVID um uh super subsidies. It totally has to do because Obamacare is a flawed system that that isn't working. And yet, I guarantee you, watch your colleagues uh with the in some of the red states wimp out and decide that we're going to we're going to pretend that we care and and and we're going to renew these subsidies. Right. Well, you know, the bottom line is that we made some progress uh with the previous bill. And a lot of people share your opinion about about Obamacare.

You know, most of the people who are getting insurance in Obamacare are just being put on Medicaid at sometimes four times uh the poverty limit. And so, the thing to remember is that these high subsidies uh that are expiring are expiring because the Democrats passed a bill saying they should expire then because the emergency over COVID is over. So, Democrats themselves said that we should take them away. And now, they're just trying to use them as a political cudgel to try to score some points. Kevin, you want to say they they did it. They did it because it was too expensive to do it for longer.

It's the same reason that the Republicans passed temporary tax cuts that you just made pub- that you just made permanent. It it's because of the way it was scored with the OMB. It would have been too expensive to say they were going to do it otherwise. It's it's not that they wanted it to end. It's that they couldn't afford to pay for it. But but I mean, there are budgets and budget constraints in government.

And if it was free, they would have done it forever. But they stopped it when they did because But it's the same thing with the tax cuts that were originally temporary and that was just made This is both parties do this. They play with the numbers because they know they hope these things will be permanent, but they can't afford to pay for it at the time. So, they make them temporary and assume that it's going to be too hard for anybody to ever take them back. Tax cuts included. They put four times uh people with income four times the poverty level uh on Medicaid and said they were doing so because of an emergency.

And the emergency's over. And so, I understand your point, Becky. But that in the end, they had to stop these subsidies because the subsidies made no sense. And now, maybe if they open the government up, then maybe somebody on the hill is going to want to negotiate, well, maybe we should do this or that to the subsidies. But that's not where we are right now because they want to give the health insurance to illegal aliens. They want to keep this sort of massive expansion that they did during the emergency.

They're holding Americans, workers, and American government services hostage. And it's just not right. When do you think uh GDP or the economy starts to be affected? Cuz it takes a while, doesn't it? What what what's What do you think? Is it uh a month?

How long does it take? You know, my friends over at the Council of Economic Advisers gave me a report at the end of the week that said that it costs the US uh GDP about $15 billion a week for a shutdown uh or about a tenth of a percent of GDP. And so, if the shutdown continues for a long time, then there're going to be a lot of things that don't happen, and it will show up in the GDP number. Now, the good news is that the the economy is booming. We've got uh GDP now at 3.8%. We've got retail sales year-over-year up 6%.

We've got a capital spending boom. We've got deals like the ones that you've been talking about this morning happening left and right. And so, there's a lot of good news out there. And and I think the government shutdown in the end is just going to be a footnote in history. But the Democrats need to come to the table, get the government open, and then if they want to negotiate over something, they can. Is the Fed flying more blind now that than they normally are?

It's hard to imagine. Yeah, right. Their their data You you know, there there there are data items that aren't coming out. Uh we didn't get the jobs numbers last week. But then again, the jobs numbers have been revising so much that it's hard to extract a signal uh from from the first print. And so, I think yes, the the Fed would like to have more data.

Yes, the Democrats need to open up uh the government so that we get the data that we need so that we're making policy decisions based on the data. Uh but but I do wonder about the quality of the data lately, which is something that we've been talking about on your show. Is it You you think inflation, the print when it does finally come, is Are we back to Are we at 3% at this point, do you think? On on the the most Go ahead. I think we're below If you if you look at the GDP deflator, which is kind of a one measure of the macroeconomic measure of inflation. I know the Fed uses other ones like PCE.

But it was 2.1%. And so, inflation by any measure has come down by maybe about 50% since uh President Trump took office. It's headed in the right direction. More importantly, we're having a productivity boom that's unlike anything we've seen since the '90s. And when there's a big productivity boom like that, then that means that you can have growth without inflation. And that's our main expectation right now.

If you really had to uh to just be very forthcoming, does the want to do dodge you? I I really want you to to nail this one, Kevin. Does the president want to do dodge type cuts to uh the federal workforce? Or is it always Is it a threat just to bring Democrats to the bargaining table to to reopen the govern- the government? What And I guess Russ Vought What is Russ Vought Is the president holding back Russ Vought who really would would love to do it either way? What's really going on?

Look look, we've uh from the beginning, from the time that Elon came, have had an objective of making government more efficient, of uh taking away positions that were you know, no-show positions and so on. And uh government employment, the latest numbers I'm seeing is down by more than 200,000. And so, for sure, we're going to continue to want to make government more efficient. But right now, uh this particular moment is about keeping the government open. And if the Democrats refuse to keep the government open, then perhaps uh the efforts we've been making to make government more efficient will even accelerate because of the extra legal authorities we have because they haven't appropriated the As far as uh this shifting gears a little Where are we on trade? Where are we with with with Um could you see tariff money being used to support the farmers who uh obviously are being hit hard by I think, you know, China uh retaliated against some of the tariffs recently.

Maybe they had slowed buying soybeans last year, but uh certainly they they went to zero in May based on the tariffs. Right. Uh Is it Is that an option that it's going to happen? Right. The president has already said that he thinks that the tariff money is going to be useful for helping us find the funds that we need to help farmers. We've had numerous meetings over the last week or two about exactly what we're going to do uh to help the farmers.

But we're taking big measures, and those big measures are going to be public really really soon. And uh I Yes. So, for sure, uh China has especially for soybean farmers has stopped buying US soybeans. Uh right now, the silos are full, and there are soybeans sitting on the ground with tarps over them. That's unacceptable to the president. We're calling up all our soybean customers around the world as part of our trade negotiations.

And we're also getting ready uh to have really strong policies to support our farmers. We haven't heard anything about trade negotiations recently. What happened to India? It's still a work in progress. Uh Is it With everything that's going on with in the Middle East and everything else, is it Are these back burners at at this You know, we've got teams at USTR and at Commerce that are in constant contact and with of course Secretary Bessette who's leading uh the negotiation with the Chinese. You know, they're they're in touches every day uh as we try to make sure that we're making a little bit of progress every day.

Uh but you're right, there's been a heck of a lot going on in the world, especially the last week with the government shutdown. Uh and uh you know, the but the trade negotiations are continuing. Kevin, if we get back to uh to business, the business of the is there any way between now and the end of the year with appropriations that there's any type of bipartisan movement on some some of the daunting issues facing Once we get out Once we get the government shutdown behind us, then they got it The Congress has to get back to work. Is it Is the Is the atmosphere so toxic at this point that we can expect just more of the same or Where do you see possibly some progress? You know, there there are a lot of moderate Democrats that are very upset about what's going on in the Senate right now. And you know, we've already got uh what, three Democratic votes to keep the government open.

And so, I think that uh Schumer's leadership is really coming under question. Is he going to continue to be able to get everybody to speak with one voice? You know, that's really not what's supposed to happen in the Senate. The Senate is supposed to be the place to go back to Federalist 63, you know, where we were basically put the Senate there because there were people that would speak their minds, that they would be a voice of reason, and so on. And instead of uh doing that, right now Democratic senators are not the voice of reason, the voice of moderarity uh moderation. They're the the voice of Schumer.

Uh and we need to get either Schumer to start working together with everybody, or maybe people need to think about whether they're willing to help us make America great again. We've We've got lots of policy ideas on the table that are should have bipartisan support. Okay, Kevin uh Kevin uh He called it He called it Kevin Hassett. You No one wants to be called Hassett, uh I don't think at at this point. Uh Kevin, give give it all District asset. Asset.

District asset. Maximizing assets with Kevin Hassett. That's That's a good one. Have you You've used that before? It's pretty good. Yeah, I don't know.

It's a pretty bad one. It's kind of a dad thing, right? No, I think it's good. All right. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

Next on Squawk Pod, job shuffles at the White House. Wow. Okay, I need a some type of a flowchart or something. And trader, investor, and market watcher Paul Tudor Jones, with a big market call. It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck is probably not a chicken, all right? And a note of caution about today's artificial intelligence exuberance.

The one thing we know about the the AI boom is going to be some huge winners. Right. Some huge losers. You're listening to Squawk Pod from Stand by, Joe. Is Mike here? All right.

A news alert uh now coming from the Treasury Department. We're going to go to Amon Javers uh for that. He joins us live from Washington. Amon, good morning. Yeah, good morning, guys. CNBC can report exclusively that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who took over the IRS on a temporary basis back in August as acting commissioner, will now remain in that job indefinitely with a new official to be announced today as his number two.

Now, Bessent will announce that Frank Bisignano will serve in the newly created position of chief executive officer of the IRS. Bessent took over the IRS after President Trump removed Billy Long from the post this summer. And it was intended as a temporary stopgap position, but a source familiar with the situation tells CNBC that President Trump wants Bessent to keep control of the tax uh collection service. Now, Bisignano will report directly to acting commissioner Bessent, and he will oversee all day-to-day operations of the IRS. And he'll also continue to serve in his current job as commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Bisignano previously served as chairman and CEO of Fiserv, the world's largest financial services and payment technology company.

He led the 2019 merger of Fiserv and First Data while serving as CEO of First Data. He also served as co-chief operating officer and CEO of the mortgage banking unit of JPMorgan Chase in the 2000s. And before that, served in various roles at Citigroup. So, guys, this means Bessent will continue to wear two hats more or less indefinitely here. Uh even as he brings in an experienced large financial organization manager to run the day-to-day at IRS, who himself is going to be wearing two hats, one at IRS and one at Social Security. Back over to you Wow.

Okay, I need a uh like some type of a flow chart uh or something. A lot of hats being worn by a lot of people around here. What is the rationale between for just not giving Bisignano the the IRS job? Is it Is there any reason not to do that? Just just uh get you know, the Treasury Secretary is pretty busy already. Yeah, I mean, a source familiar with the with the situation tells me that uh the president simply li- likes Bessent in that role, wants to keep him there.

Uh and so, maybe there's a comfort factor, Joe, from the president to Bessent that they're in the Oval Office together several times a day. And I think uh that might just be the explanation right Heck Heck, what's a what's chairman of the Fed when you got all these other things? I I mean, he says he He's focused on the Fed. >> was floating that idea of chairman of the Fed and Treasury at the same time, right? So, Yeah, anything's possible, I >> And IRS. Okay.

Uh uh you're not avail- Can you take any of the slack off, Amon? Are you up for anything? Probably not, I only have one hat. All right. Thanks, Amon. Yeah, back to >> some breaking news.

Verizon announcing a new CEO, catching me by surprise, I don't know about everybody else. But they are uh saying that Hans Vestberg is going to be stepping down. He will stick around as a special advisor through October 4th of 2026. So, that's a year from now. Uh he'll also be a member of the Board of Directors until that 2026 annual meeting. The new uh CEO is the independently director and former CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman.

He's going to be stepping in as this. Mark Berliner is going to be appointed the new chairman of the Board of Directors. And uh they are re- reiterating their full 2025 uh fiscal guidance uh financial guidance for the year. So, I'm not sure why he's stepping down, but he is sticking around next year to be staying on the both the Board of Directors and as an advisor. And uh Dan Schulman, someone we know well, is going to be the new CEO at Verizon. Take a look at the shares right now.

They're up by about 16 cents. Year-to-date, that stock is up by close to 10%. We're joined right now by legendary investor Paul Tudor Jones. He's the founder and CIO of Tudor Investment Corporation, of course, the founder and board member at the Robin Hood Foundation. And we should mention that on October 15th, Robin Hood's Foundation is hosting its 13th annual investor conference right here in New York City. And we'll talk about that.

Uh but a lot of headlines. You know the Verizon guys. You know Schulman pretty well, actually. >> Dan Schulman is chairman of Just Capital. So, that's a great day for Dan, a great day for corporate America, a great day for America and capitalism. Okay, so, let me ask you about the markets, though, Okay.

right now. Because we have all these big headlines, including today. Right. We have this Open AI deal Right. with AMD. AMD is >> Right.

There's these warrants. Some people look at these uh sort of these circular deals. Like two weeks ago, a similar deal with Nvidia. We've got a big bank Right. deal this morning. We're going to hear uh from Fifth Third's uh CEO in just a little bit.

You were, I think, dare I say, very pessimistic the last time I saw you here back in May. How do you feel now? Um well, it it It's like the Prince song. It's 1999. Party like it's 1999, right? Feels exactly like 1999.

I don't know whether we'll actually replay it exactly, but I think all the ingredients are in place. And certainly from a trading standpoint, you have to position yourself like it's October '99. Um I don't see why you would do anything but that. And remember, the Nasdaq doubled between the first week of October '99 and March of 2000. So, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck is probably not a chicken, all right? But you think it's '99.

It's not '98. I mean, everyone's in the it's either '98, '99, but it's not '96, I guess, is the point. And that's that's a problem, potentially. Right. Or it's maybe an opportunity, but you have to get on and off the train pretty quick. Well, if you just think about bull markets, right?

The the greatest price appreciation always the 12 months preceding the top. So, that's the nature of a of a bull market. It kind of doubles whatever the annual average is and before then. So, if you don't play it, Right. you're missing out on the juice. If you do play it, you get you have to have really happy feet because there will be uh a really, really bad end to it.

And my guess is that I think all the ingredients are in place for some kind of a blow-off. Will it happen? Again, history rhymes a lot. So, I would think some version of it is going to happen again. If If anything now is so much more potentially explosive than 1999. At '99, we were looking at a rate hike in November.

Now, we're looking at a rate cut. We were looking at four more rate hikes before we actually topped in 2000. Now, we're looking at four rate Well, three or four rate cuts, probably at least. So, you have monetary policy that's going to take us to real rates of zero or less, probably depending upon the next Fed And then, the big difference is, obviously, fiscal policy. We had a budget surplus in '99, 2000. Now, we've got a 6% budget deficit.

So, that fiscal monetary combination is a brew that we haven't seen since, I guess, the postwar period, early '50s, something like that. And that was crazy times, right? Coming out of the war. >> But you think that most people who are watching us now, you need to be in this market now. But then, the question is, as I said, is you have to jump off the train before the train crashes, if you're suggesting the train is going to I'm not suggesting the train's going to crash. I'm suggesting that we're in a period that's conducive for massive price appreciation in a variety of assets.

Will it happen or not? I don't know. There's If you kind of just look If you just think about the leverage that we had in '99, you look at margin debt. And then, you look at today's margin debt, but you have to throw in leveraged ETFs cuz people don't use margin like they did back then. We're probably a little more elevated than we were in October of '99. It will take a speculative frenzy for us to elevate those prices, right?

It will take more retail buying. It'll take more recruitment from a variety of other from long-short hedge funds, from real money, etc. It'll take a a combination of those things. It's not going to go up without flows. And without a story. The story's there.

It's the combination of the most unique and aggressive fiscal and uh conditions that we've ever seen. >> Okay, if you're If you're right, who are the winners, then, in that? And who are the losers? Cuz right now, we're looking at an Nvidia, obviously, being a major winner. Even AMD today, major winner. But there's this unique arrangement that's almost circular.

>> The Yeah, the circularity makes me Um I would say, and I and I'm going to think of it in broad terms. Um I think what the markets are telling you, this is an inflation story down the road. If you look at the biggest winners, right? The biggest winners are gold. I think it's up 46, 47%. Bitcoin, I want to say it's up 50 or 60.

I'm not even sure. There's a Morgan Stanley basket that's a retail flow basket. It has all the meme stocks in it. It's up 67, 68%. So, it's really what retail jumps on. So, crypto, digital gold, that's obviously something that's very, very appealing.

>> mean you're jumping on all of that right now? Well, I'd want to have positions in all of it, for sure. So, if you said to me, "What are they going to be the winners?" You Again, we have this race. Right. The race, realistically, is certainly to the end of the year, um because that's when everyone marks institutionally. And then you have to figure out what's going to go on in next year.

So, what would I want to have? I'd want to have a combination of um gold, crypto, probably the Nasdaq. I I think I want to say that I've said that before, and I think that's still the right one, and I think uh whatever the fastest horse is at this point in time probably has a good chance of being that on Dec 31. Okay, let me ask you though about this. So, I said that you were pessimistic the last time I saw you. This was May 6th, 2025.

So, just uh what? Couple months ago. You said, "For me, it's pretty clear." This is back though in May. "You have Trump who's locked in tariffs. You have the Fed who's locked in not cutting rates. That is not good for the stock market.

We'll probably go down to new lows even when Trump dials back China to Correct. That was really wrong, wasn't it? Well, I'm curious what you think of that now. Uh And what what what you think you got >> that point in time, >> Yep. the stock market was still on the way back up. It was still flirting with the 200-day moving average.

I am really the one thing that I've learned in my job is humility, how often we are wrong. So, I'm going to always use as my standard bearer the 200-day moving average. I'll give you a great example. Take the 200-day moving average in the US stock market. When we have easy conditions right now and US stocks and the Fed is easing, the stock market on average doubles its return above the 200-day moving average. When it's below the 200-day moving average, which I think it was at that point in time, and you're easing and/or tightening, you have returns that are in single digits.

momentum, price momentum, is extraordinarily important to whatever your trading/investment thesis is. Nothing good ever happens under the 200-day moving average in any asset. So, when the market changes, I'm going to change with it, too, right? What do you think of the bond market right now? I mean, are you surprised how complacent it seems to be relative to what seems like a lot of volatility, if you will, in Washington? So, so I've consistently believed that the biggest bubble that we have is in sovereign debt.

And a great question, one that I thought you would have asked me rather than that one, is why have we not had a blowup in the bond market? And of course, the reason for that is that now that we've >> This was the nicer cousin of that question. Yes. Uh the reason for that is because with the easing cycle, you've brought in a whole bunch of flows attendant with that. We've taken asset managers $500 overweight. So, we've pulled forward all that demand in anticipation of this easing cycle, right?

So, we've pulled that forward. That's just one example. You've pulled in mutual fund and retail flows. So, this easing cycle has delayed, but certainly not ended, what inevitably is going to be a huge problem with sovereign debt somewhere down the road. >> the tipping point for that then? Because there's always been this view that the bond vigilantes would hold Washington in check.

Oh, I think they ultimately will. I mean, again, I think it's been delayed. I don't think we've Just think about this year. You've had elections in India, Korea, let this weekend in Japan. Every one of those Every single one of those elections were for pro-growth candidates. Every single one of those countries are expanding their budget deficits.

It is wild that we continue to go ahead I think probably England's the only place, because they actually have budget rules, where you're going to experiment with austerity. Every other place, we're going to grow our way out of the problem. And so, I I feel it's a bit like Star Trek. We're kind of boldly going where no man has ever gone before. Uh and that's where I feel like we're doing in sovereign debt markets. And of course, when you're going to see it manifest itself, a problem is going to be at the end of this easing cycle, when all that demand has been pushed forward.

If you look at uh the amount of debt that's going to be required to be financed next year, which is with the AI buildout, it's going to even go up once you add the corporate line item on top of the sovereign line item. Um you're still looking at a huge increase in supply of debt, much larger than I think the market could handle in normal times. But again, we're in an easing cycle, so we continue to bring in these flows. And when that easing cycle a year from now, yeah, probably a year year from now, it's going to be really interesting to see how the bond market's doing at that point in time. Um all of these conversations we're having right now, you're about to have in a very big way with some really interesting investors um in about a week from now. What's on So, in our investor conference, we have a hell of a lineup.

We've got Jamie Dimon and Ken Griffin. I'm going to interview Dario Modi. I'm so excited about that one. That one's the one that on a personal level I have the greatest interest in, because I think of the tech titans, he's the most honest, the most transparent. Uh and I want to get him to update his views on what he thinks the actual displacement will be uh in employment. Remember, he's used a number anywhere from 5 to 20%.

So, I'm really interested in hearing him talk about that. Uh again, if I think about AI, that also, much like Star Trek, we're boldly going where no man has ever gone before. The only difference is we don't have Captain James Tiberius Kirk Right. uh leading the ship. We have no one leading the ship. Um we don't have science officer Spock to bring in logic and reason.

The few people that bring that in um get run over by those that argue, "We can't have any regulation." Of course, if we stop that, then we're going to stop We're going to stop the progress of artificial intelligence. And it's It's really interesting, because we just did a poll with the American public. And so, 83% of the American public thinks AI will be a net social positive. Um And which is great. I believe that. There's no question.

It's It's so fascinating, because it's a two-faced phenomenon, right? You have so many fantastic things that are to come from it. But then you also got these incredible threats. So, you're constantly torn between the good and the bad side of AI. What I wish from those like Dario would be to not just acknowledge the fact that we also threats that come from AI, but to actually begin to think about how society's going to deal with those. Because we know it's going to bring these wonderful things, and that's fantastic.

But it's also potentially going to bring job displacement. Uh we're going to have higher electric bills for a whole variety of people, environmental concerns. And then of course, you have the safety issues. So, we We've just done some great polling at Just Capital. Uh and it's so interesting, because if you ask the American public what they think AI should be spending, for instance, on AI safety, right now companies spend a quarter of 1% of total spend on AI safety. The American public thinks that number should be 5% or greater.

So, again, there's a interesting dialogue to be continued on that. And hopefully, we'll see some more rational thinking with regard to how we should be managing this fantastic product in a way that benefits society in the greatest way. >> like we're going to have It's all going to come at the same time, meaning we're going to have the employment issues that you're talking about. At the same time, we might even have a little bit of a bust in the boom cycle. Uh again, uh history rhymes a lot. Who knows exactly how it's going to play out.

It It is a very combustible situation from investing standpoint. And it's also going to be The one thing we know about the the AI boom is there's going to be some huge winners, some huge losers. It's like every great technology, right? You You You You >> But that's the question. Do you Do you invest? Do you say Nvidia, AMD, the big guys are all the winners?

Look, Amazon was a winner. Pets.com was a loser. Was that obvious to you in then? Um Well, you just What you knew at that time with And again, what you knew at that time is that at some point in time, there was going to be an end to the cycle because inflation, a variety of other things. We're in this really crazy situation where we're looking at 8 months from now, we're going to have a new Fed chair who probably's going to have rates, depending upon who they choose, somewhere between 2 and 3% Fed funds at two and 3% negative real rates with a 6% budget deficit. You wrote 1929.

You tell me what's going to happen. It's a longer conversation. I know, I'm genuinely concerned and I think but I think the question is how much leverage is in is in the system. That to me is the fundamental issue. Every crisis is a function of too much leverage in the >> Okay, so where we are right now, if I'm just thinking of the stock market kind of in '99 it was around 1.7% of market cap was margin debt. Today you've got to throw in leveraged ETFs.

Right. Because you can't margin debt really doesn't have the same function it had 26 year 25 years ago. You throw that in we're probably starting at about 2.2%. It It added 1% of market cap at the top in 2000. My guess is we'll exceed that, but again you need to be looking at some combination of leveraged ETFs, margin debt, a variety of those things that will be I think a great way of measuring the pulse of what speculative frenzy may come. Right.

Well, we will see. Um congratulations on the upcoming event. Thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you so much. It's always wonderful being here and go Robinhood. We have to help the least among us and particularly the people that watch this that profit from it have a responsibility to do to Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you. It's a good message. That's Squawk Pod for today. Thanks for starting your week with us here. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6:00 Eastern to get the smartest takes and analysis from our TV show right into your ears. Follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Have a great Monday. We'll meet you back here tomorrow. And we are clear. Thanks, guys.

Key Themes

This is the 200-day rule applied in public and in real time — including the confession that in May the rule, not his conviction, should have governed. The 1999 framing is the analog model used as a positioning tool rather than a prediction ("history rhymes a lot"), and the year-end horse race is the fastest horse framework in its current form, now with gold and crypto as co-leaders. The sovereign-debt warning carries forward the debt-dynamics thesis he laid out in the 2022 CNBC interview: the biggest bubble is in sovereign debt, and the easing cycle has "delayed, but certainly not ended" the reckoning.

Context & Significance

The interview brackets PTJ's 2025 with the June Bloomberg appearance: June was the debt-trap playbook and the "uber-dovish" Fed-chair bet; October is that bet paying out in positioning — rate cuts coming, blow-off risk rising, own the horses. It also previews the 2025 Robin Hood Investors Conference nine days later, where he would interview Dario Amodei on AI displacement, and it showcases a discipline rarely seen from market legends: using a wrong call as the occasion to restate the system that overrides his own views. As a late-era document it pairs the offensive posture (ride the melt-up) with the defensive exit plan (happy feet, the 200-day), which is the whole PTJ method in one appearance.