Travis Hutchison, a soybean farmer, unloads his cargo from his family’s truck at a local grain dealer in Queen Anne, Maryland, on Oct. 10, 2025.
Roberto Schmidt | AFP | Getty Images
This is CNBC’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.
Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day:
1. Transpacific turmoil
The volatile U.S.-China relationship hit another bump yesterday when President Donald Trump said he is considering placing a cooking oil embargo on Beijing in retaliation for it’s refusal to buy U.S. soybeans. The ongoing feud has led to choppy stock market trading over recent days.
Here’s the latest:
In a Truth Social post published shortly before yesterday’s closing bell, Trump wrote that China’s refusal to buy American soybeans is “an Economically Hostile Act.” Trump threatened blocking all business with China “having to do with Cooking Oil.”
China was the top buyer of the U.S. crop last year but has not purchased any soybeans since May, as the countries have sparred over trade policy.
The White House has criticized China in recent days and threatened a new 100% tariff, following China’s tightening of export restrictions for rare earth materials.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC yesterday that China’s future actions will determine if the higher levies are actually implemented. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China’s latest moves are an attempt “to pull everybody else down with them.”
Stocks have whipsawed in recent sessions as investors monitored the latest developments. The S&P 500 ended yesterday’s session in the red after Trump’s post stymied the index’s attempted comeback.
A customer uses an ATM at a Bank of America branch in Boston, Massachusetts.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
3. Day 15
Travelers wait to go through security at O’Hare International Airport (ORD) in Chicago, Illinois, US, on Friday Oct. 10, 2025.
Christopher Dilts | Bloomberg | Getty Images
While Trump has repeatedly said that his administration’s mass layoffs are targeting “Democrat Agencies” amid the shutdown, the cuts also appear to be affecting bipartisan efforts. At the Treasury Department — where nearly 1,450 federal employees have received reduction-in-force notices — the entire 83-person staff of the bipartisan-supported Community Development Financial Institutions Fund was cut.
As the shutdown enters its third week, air traffic controllers have handed out leaflets at some airports urging the public to pressure Congress to reopen the government. Some airports meanwhile are refusing to play a video from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming Democrats for the shutdown.
4. Taking off
The Boeing Company at Paris Air Show 2025 in Le Bourget airport.
Nicolas Economou | Nurphoto | Getty Images
With September’s figures now in the books, Boeing is on track for its highest annual plane delivery count since 2018. The company said yesterday that it delivered 55 aircraft last month, bringing its total to 440 airplanes in the first nine months of 2025.
As CNBC’s Leslie Josephs notes, Boeing has been able to stabilize its production following several safety and production crises. Executives are aiming to increase production of Boeing’s pricey 737 Max planes.
Boeing on Tuesday also received approval from European Union antitrust regulators for its $4.7 billion acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems. The plane maker agreed to sell some of Spirit’s businesses to remedy competition concerns.
Get Morning Squawk directly in your inbox
5. Cash grab
Cheng Xin | Getty Images
The Justice Department seized around $15 billion worth of bitcoin from the cryptocurrency wallets of Chen Zhi, who prosecutors allege ran a large-scale “pig butchering” fraud operation in Cambodia. Zhi, who remains at large, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.
It is the largest-ever forfeiture action sought by the DOJ.
The Daily Dividend
Survey results from JPMorgan highlight just how differently Americans in different income brackets view the economy.
— CNBC’s Leslie Josephs, Dan Mangan, Lillian Rizzo, Kevin Breuninger, Spencer Kimball, Jeff Cox and Liz Napolitano contributed to this report. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.
Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that moving some AI functions away from the could help reduce energy usage.
Over time, he suggested, a large number of multi-gigawatt data centers won’t be sustainable.
“You look to yourself, well, what are the kind of things that need to happen? I think there’s two vectors to it,” Haas said. “One is low power, the lowest power solution you can get in the cloud. Arm really contributes there. But I think even more specifically is moving those AI workloads away from the cloud to local applications.”
While he said AI training will likely always happen in the cloud, running AI, called inference, can happen locally — meaning on the chips inside people’s phones, computers and glasses. History has shown “we always go to hybrid models around computing,” according to Haas.
He suggested that hybrid dynamic will play out when it comes to AI, which will help alleviate huge power investments.
Chip designer Arm’s technology powers devices made by a number of major Big Tech players, including Microsoft and Amazon. Semiconductor giant Nvidia has a major stake in Arm and actually attempted to acquire the company in 2020.
Arm and Meta on Wednesday said they would expand their partnership to “scale AI efficiency across every layer of compute – spanning AI software and data center infrastructure,” according to a press release. Arm stock saw gains following the announcement, finishing the day up 1.49%.
Haas told Cramer that the partnership with Meta is “largely around data centers, but more broadly…around software and the software stacks associated with it.” He also discussed Arm’s involvement in Meta’s new Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses, saying the AI for the technology is running both in the cloud and locally.
“For example, when you say, ‘hey, Meta,’ into those glasses, that’s not happening on the cloud, that’s actually happening in your glasses, and that’s running on Arm,” Haas said.
Jim Cramer’s Guide to Investing
Sign up now for the CNBC Investing Club to follow Jim Cramer’s every move in the market.
Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust owns shares of Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia.
Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc., speaks during the 2025 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salesforce shares rose as much as 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the software vendor issued new financial targets for the next few years.
The company said it now expects revenue of over $60 billion in 2030, above the $58.37 billion consensus among analysts polled by LSEG.
The guidance excludes impact from the pending acquisition of data management company Informatica. The $8 billion deal, announced in May, is slated to close in the fiscal fourth quarter or in the first quarter of the 2027 fiscal year.
“We have had some lower-stage growth for a while,” Robin Washington, Salesforce’s chief operating and financial officer, said during an investor briefing at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “That is reaccelerating.”
She company called for an organic year-over-year revenue growth rate above 10% in the 2026 through 2030 fiscal years. The growth rate has been under 10% since mid-2024.
Investors have been concerned, in part because of the rise of “vibe-coding” tools for automatically generating software with a few words of human input. Industry observers have predicted that artificial intelligence services might threaten longstanding software providers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April that AI is creating up to 30% of new code at the company.
“There’s a certain amount of, let’s just say, nonsense that’s out there,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Wednesday. “Like, for example, that these products are writing all the software, and that is not what’s happening.”
As of Wednesday’s close, Salesforce’s stock had fallen 29% for the year, while the Nasdaq has gained 17%.
To increase revenue, Salesforce is counting on its Agentforce software for automating customer service and other business processes, said Washington, who also sits on Salesforce’s board. The company introduced Agentforce last year as a way for brands to add chat-based customer service agents that connect large language models to internal data.
“Investors continue to ask why Agentforce adoption has been slower than anticipated,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients earlier this month.
Salesforce executives are hoping product enhancements will attract more business.
The company on Monday released Agentforce Voice, which allows clients to have agents answer customer service calls. On Tuesday, Salesforce announced larger partnerships with AI model developers Anthropic and OpenAI, bringing their latest models to Agentforce.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce pointed to Agentforce adoption at FedEx, Pandora, PepsiCo, Williams Sonoma and other companies.
As U.S. states start to react to growing constituent concerns around the risks associated with artificial intelligence use, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn said moving forward with a federal preemption standard is “imperative.”
Earlier this week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of bills focused on those concerns — while also vetoing some strict AI conditions legislators hoped for — requiring safeguards around chatbots, labels around the mental risks of social media apps, and tools that require age verification in device maker app stores.
In addition, Utah and Texas have also signed laws implementing AI safeguards for minors, and other states have indicated similar regulations could be on the horizon.
“The reason the states have stepped in, whether it’s to protect consumers or protect children, is because the federal government has, to date, not been able to pass any federal preemptive legislation,” Blackburn said at the CNBC AI Summit on Wednesday in Nashville. “We have to have the states standing in the gap until such time that Congress will say no to the big tech platforms.”
Blackburn has long been a proponent of legislation around children’s online safety and regulation of social media, introducing the Kid’s Online Safety Act in 2022 that aims to establish guidelines to protect minors from harmful material on the platforms. The bipartisan legislation has passed the Senate with an overwhelming majority, and Blackburn said while big tech companies have worked to hold up the legislation from passage in both chambers, “We are hopeful the House is going to take it up and pass it.”
But the concerns that the Act was aimed to address as it relates to social media have now cascaded alongside the rise in AI, Blackburn said.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)(R) speaks during a rally organized by Accountable Tech and Design It For Us to hold tech and social media companies accountable for taking steps to protect kids and teens online on January 31, 2024 in Washington, D.C.
Jemal Countess | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
“One of the things we’ve heard from so many people involved in this is that you have to have an online consumer privacy protection bill so that people have the ability to set those firewalls and protect the virtual you, as I call it,” she said, adding that “once an LLM scoops [your data and information], then they are using that to train that model.”
Blackburn is also focused on several other ways of safeguarding the information that AI is using, including a bill focused on how AI can use your name, image or likeness without your consent.
“We have to have a way to protect our information in the virtual spaces just as we do in the physical space,” she said.
With the fast advancement of AI, Blackburn acknowledged that regulation would require a focus on “end-use utilizations and legislate that framework in that manner and not focus on a given delivery system or a given technology.”
That also means reacting to the ways that AI companies change their products. Earlier this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company will be able to “safely relax” most restrictions now that it has been able to mitigate “serious mental health issues,” adding that the company is “not the elected moral police of the world.”
Blackburn said that legislators are increasingly hearing from “parents who know what is happening to their children and that they can’t un-experience or unsee something that they have been through with these chatbots or in the virtual world or the metaverse.”
“I have talked to so many people who are now saying kids are not going to get cell phones until they’re 16, and many parents believe that is just like driving a car,” she said. “They’re not going to allow their kids to have that because we as a society have to put rules and laws in place that protect children and minors.”