maria: wednesday morning. thanks very much for joining us, i'm maria bartiromo. it is wednesday, maybe 29, just before -- it is 7:00 a.m. on the button on the east coast. time for the hot topic of the hour. the white house giving a

nonanswer to a report that democrats are in full blown freak out mode over of president biden's chances, a majority of democrats want to dump biden from the particular the et. >> are you in full-blown freak out mode. >> i'm not going to comment on the election. the president has never forgotten where he came from, who he is, he understands what a the american people are going through as they're sitting around the kitchen table. maria: meanwhile, the democrat national commit you at this says it will nominate president biden and vice president harris virtually to ensure biden is on the ballot. interesting they have to nominate him virtually before the chicago convention. are they worried he's not going to be on the ballot? >> you've nailed it. he's lost his mojo, he's losing

his base. democrats are leaving in droves when you look at blacks, hispanics. americans today have no confidence because he'ses truly steering this titanic into an inflation burg and we're feeling the devastating effects. democrats are in freak-out mode. they don't know what to do with the kamala harris problem. we've been freaking out about cam for quite some time. they can't fire her because she's the first black vice president so they're going to play musical chairs here, i guarantee. this is a side show for the real show which is gavin newsom stepping in. that's my prediction. maria: an op-ed in the hill by jt young says biden's cash advantage may be meaningless as well, he says the dollars his campaign could have used in battleground states will be needed to shore up support in states they presumed to be safely theirs. emily, that's how bad it's getting, even in bright blue states, they're worried.

why? because trump has changed the game. he went to minnesota, went to the south bronx, went to new jersey and commanded a huge group of people and followers. >> i think what we're seeing here is that president biden's age'sagenda has been so ineffece he doesn't want to run on it. we see a campaign that i'm better than the other guy, that's not something that motivates voters, doesn't bring out the youth vote, doesn't bring out the labor vote. president trump is taking advantage of that. maria: your thoughts. >> to touch on emily's point, to come out and say i'm better than the other guy, when you look at the cross tabs of the polls, when you see the headline number come out, the pollster takes data and tries to predict who will vote. you look at how people feel on a raw database sis and who the electorate believes is more competent, better on the

economy, who they believe is better on inflation, who they believe is better on immigration, trumps is winning by 20 or 25 points and when you look at things like who do i believe will be a more competent leader, you're in a 20 to 30 point swing from four years ago. you cannot undo these things over the next six months. and it's these cross tabs,s especially among hispanic voters, among younger voters and independents, this is why they are freaking out because joe biden needs to win by about 4 points nationally to be able to carry the electoral college so anything that has him tied with trump or down to trump or only up 1 is going to be an a electoral college landslide for joe biden and the reason why i believe joe biden will remain on the ticket, when you have direct polls between trump and gavin newsom, trump and kamala harris, the gap between trump and the

other opponent widens, so out of the democrats, joe biden polls the best which is why he's there. so look, if you're a trump supporter, if you want change right now, things are looking very good for you for november. maria: well, i mean, look, that's if the in fact we have a fair and transparent election. it is about who counts the votes after all. are you expecting that, mack? >> i am worried about a fair and balanced election today. remember, we have over 12 million undocumented illegal immigrants that are in the country today. what's the plan for them? they're all getting identification. they're getting social security. they're getting handouts from government. and these individuals can now go state by state because we don't have uniform laws and vote. we have you allowed voting of illegal immigrants in new york, d.c. and so many other parts of the country and democrats are pushing back every time you say show us that you're a u.s. citizen like in arizona, they're pushing back. why? because they want our country to be overrun. maria: and right now

noncitizens are voting in local elections in washington, emily. >> yeah. i mean, i think this is part of why it's so important for us to keep house republicans in the majority. we need that oversight ability to the be able to make sure we're not seeing this election overreach in states across the country and we lose that if you lose the gavels in the house. maria: we've got a lot coming up. investors are keeping an eye on the economy and the economic data out this week, we'll get the second read of first gunfire gdp and april pse index coming up this week as an inflation reading will signal the fed's next move on rates. the word on wall street panel is here with expectations. don't miss that. you're watching "mornings with maria" live on fox business. we'll be right back. ♪

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maria: welcome back. time now for the word on wall street, top investors watching your money. joining me is payne capital management president and host of payne points of wealth podcast, ryan payne back with us, also with us is mike lee this morning. great to see you. thank you for joining the conversation. mike, thank you so much for being here. i want to the get your take on the macro story. we've got a busy week of retail earnings, dick's sporting goods crossed moments ago, stock is up almost 8% with a double beat. it raised the full year guidance, dick's sporting goods now up 7 and two-thirds percent at 210 bucks. we'll hear from dollar general, best buy and kohl's tomorrow morning. followed by costco and nordstrom after the bell tomorrow night. your reaction to the earnings so far, mike. >> the consumer discretionary sector on the whole has had a pretty spectacular quarter in terms of earnings but most of that is from amazon and that's more from cloud computing than actual retail sales. so what i think we are seeing is

good results against very muted estimates. and so the story of this consumer and the resilience of the consumer seems to be weakening around us but i think wall street is a little too bearish on what we're seeing right here and so dick's is up spectacularly because they're expecting 3% growth, 2 to 3% growth in same store sales going forward from 1 to 2%. this is not gang buster numbers. they beat earnings. the other thing we're going to see in retail is inventories are very, very low and so as that restocking comes in, that's not good for gdp. it's what you call a whip lash effect. so you end up getting higher margins, better earnings, so i'd expect some of these surprises to the upside as we get through the week with some of these other retailers. but i don't think we're going to get an over-bullish super bullish consumer growth that a lot of people have been talking

about. that being said, the consumer is not falling off a cliff. a lot of noise is being made about credit card debt and the consumer slowing down. if you look at debt to income, debt to liabilities across every income class, the consumer's much healthier than they were five years ago or 10 years ago so as much as credit card debt, debt for the consumer's been rising, income and assets are rising faster. maria: you're not expecting recession? >> i don't expect great growth but i think we'll see muted growth but definitely expansion throughout this year and into the future. maria: the growth is also -- has been all about a.i. and i want to get your take on that, reasons. nvidia hit another all time high yesterday, the stock is on fire. it will not quit. it's now up 7% at 1139. sending the nasdaq up above 17,000 for the first time ever yesterday. look at the stock this morning of nvidia as stocks pull back in terms of the nasdaq. in the premarket it's up again.

you say nvidia might be getting too hot. why? >> i like to be a contrarian, as you know. the problem is, you have fomo. i'm going to steal mike's line. a teenager on instagram has less fomo than a corporate ceo. they're spending millions of dollars on data centers, upgrading to gpu chips. it's 10 years worth of demand upfront right now. there's no analyst last year that told us that earnings would go up over 460% a year. those same analysts aren't going to tell us when the slowdown comes. and it already trades 44 times forward earnings, above the five year average. so i think expectations are way too high. keep going higher, still $6 trillion of cash that can feed into the market can and a fuel the stocks high e i would rather be earlier than late. we learned that from k cisco. when it went down, it went down

70%. nvidia could down just as much. maria: you think it's like a cisco bubble? >> i think we're in a dot-com like bubble but you don't predict the top. i'm good, i'm not that good, maria. maria: you talk about fomo, fear of missing out. do you think this is what the rally is about. people are money on the sideline, fear of missing out, i better get in now. >> i think what artificial intelligence is right now, i tend to think of terminator 2, when someone says artificial intelligence. really it's taking data and figuring out how to monetize is. to do that, using jen ray jgenerativea.i. takes a tremendt of commuting power. you can't get there without nvidia's gpu. it remains to be seen, is this a one time upgrade or will companies continue to upgrade every two or three years, all their data centers the wholesale

because the blackwell chip is faster than the current generation chip of. chip, like l this exhaust itself. the estimates for nvidia with the 44 times forward earnings, it assumes the growth will flat line in nine months. the quarter over quarter revenue is flat and earnings quarter over quarter starts to decline so i see nvidia more trading at about 31 to 32 times for earnings, my back of the envelope math, against very conservative estimates. so if this starts to spread out, you could make the case of right now with nvidia a historical 35 to 40% multiple, 15 to 20% undervalued at the moment and if growth continues at the clip, you can see it double the stock. at some point we will run out of gas. maria: we made the point earlier that this earnings season today over the last few weeks, we've seen investments in a.i. from corporate america. when we're first starting to talk about this a.i. phenomenon

it was largely google, alphabet, rather, facebook. these companies spending on a.i. now you're actually seeing investment into a.i. from larger corporates away from tech. that gave me some instinct that maybe it has legs but how much higher can the stock go? >> look, based on the late '90s it can go a lot higher. the point is, other companies will use a.i. to improve margins. other companies will benefit. that happened in the late '90s. during the next decade all the internet stocks did nothing. all the other stocks benefited from the internet. every stock will become an a.i. company like became an internet stock. the affiliate stocks, you need a lot of energy to power a.i. you utility stocks are up 6% last month because of that. utilities need to getting inner from energy pipelines which are

up 11%, trade 75% cheaper than what nvidia does and pays a 7% difficult depend so there's just so many other places to put your money right now, getting good dividends, my clients are baby boomers, they need cash flow, they trade at a discount to what semiconductor stocks do right now. people will miss the boat by -- over-concentrating in one area. maria: other companies in tech don't have the same valuation as nvidia does. >> it's still pretty insane. i think the message is if you're smart, be proactive, rediversify your markets. when the party stops it won't be pretty and most eers ruers wil miss the boat on that. >> if you're not invested in a.i. and some of the stocks scare you, the energy demand for the first time in forever is expected to start increasing year over year and that cannot

happen without utilities so like an etf like xlu which buys the whole sector, this is an unbelievable space. it's like you're sleepiest sector of the s&p 500. it will start growing, a great place for conservative investors to look and to b benefit from te move of corporate america to artificial intelligence. maria: thank you so much, ryan payne. mike you're with us all hour. dr. anthony fauci set to testify in front of congress next week after explosive e-mails show the top aid trying to hide coronavirus information from the public. congressman michael cloud will be in the courtroom next week and he's here to give us the preview. you're watching "mornings with maria" live on fox business. stay with us. ♪

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maria: back. as you know, we've been covering the wuhan lab leak since day one. and the new york posted tore y'all board is out with a piece this morning titled fauci and company need to pay a price for

funding the wuhan lab research and trying to cover it up. the next guest questioned dr. fauci using his e-mail account to evade the freedom of information act. >> the relationship between your organization should be one of oversight and you said to start off this hearing, you said we all felt it was our job to cheer peter up. peter admitted the last time he didn't do a good job of overseeing the grant that went to the wuhan lab. it's clear our government did not do a good job of overseeing echo health. maria: fauci is set to testify before the house subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic this coming monday. joining me now, texas congressman michael cloud, a. congressman, thank you for joining us this morning. what should we expect from the hearing on monday? >> well, you know, fauci's a slippery guy. i'm sure he'll try to dance around the answer as. the odd thing, even in the

deposition we had with him and previous conversations with him, he seems to look at this covid thing that we all went through millions of lives lost, as almost his personals science fair project. it's really disturbing. it will be interesting to see how he answers the new information that's come forward about the tips to you avoid foia within his organization and surely he's wrapped up in that with everyone around him skirting foia through personal e-mail use, hard to see how he won't be implicated in that. maria: what do you think went on here? >> one of the very first things dr. morens said, he said fauci doesn't like anything coming to him personally, like it was his job to be a fence for him. it will be interesting to see. and fauci's got a lot to answer for, for sure. you know, we've seen now we know dollars from echo health went to the wuhan lab. we know that peter -- i asked peter dacheck, knowing what you

know now, if you had to do anything again, would you changes. he said no, it was great. we would do the same thing. thankfully ooh his funding's ben withdrawn. my concern is they'll try to pin him as the fall guy when we know it's broader than those two individuals. maria: the nih and fauci's were funding the wuhan lab in gain of function research and once the lab leak happened creating the deadly pandemic, killing millions across the world, they tried to cover it up? >> that's what it certainly looks like right now and of course everybody says floss smog gun. we know the wuhan lab destroyed data and so we don't have the data but we have the evidence that they destroyed the data and so this is the situation we find ourselves in where, again, these individuals seem to have done more since then even and even after we know they destroyed day taxer even after our intelligence committees are coming out, they seem to do more to protect everything that went

on and protect the wuhan lab than they have to come forward and say there's things with he need to fix, things we need to change. if they're implicated in it, they want to absolve themselves of any guilt but the american people want to see accountability. maria: for sure. that's why we're talking about the hearing on monday. it really strikes me, emily, that we are four years into this. four years after this whole coverup and this administration has still yet to hold china to account for their coverup. >> a absolutely. i think that's one of the things we've seen over and a over in the oversight efforts from the congressman and others. when i talk to folks on the hill, it's one of the top priorities, members want to see in the appropriation bills, guardrails put up so we don't end up with partnerships in china that take us down the road in the future. maria: i spoke with the chairman of the subcommittee last year, months ago, who told us all of this, laid it out for us, brad wenstrup.

here he is with me last year. >> dr. morens is an advisor to dr. fauci. what we with found when we get into internal documents is dr. dr. morens said to those working with dr. fauci to claim that covid he virus came from nature, he told them i want you to e-mail me on the g mail because the blank ety blanks are foiaing me, i don't want them to see it. i delete what i don't want to get into the new york times which is illegal. larry.maria: how many times die delete things he wasn't supposed to delete. >> it was a dozen times or more in the handful of e-mails we have. that was the absurdity of the last hearing. we expected him to plead the fifth. it would have been better for him, certainly better for the american people that we got to see what we saw.

he kept saying this was for personal use. the e-mails are obviously talking about grants, advising echo health on tweets they should do on submission and reporting and those kind of things and literally in one of the e-mails he said i'll take it to fauci or i'll take it to tony today so obviously he's doing official business on his personal g mail and over and over again he talks about the reason why, and it was to avoid foia. maria: they didn't want to upset the grants, the money they were getting, it was about money as well. >> yeah. it certainly was. you know. you have morens, one of the best friends, working for fauci for 25 years and it seemed to be inner dealings. maria: we want to cover this closely on monday. let me ask you about former president trump's new york trial resuming this morning at 10:00 a.m. eastern, judge merchan will give instruction toss the jury and they will begin deliberating. during the prosecution's closing

arguments trump took to social truth writing this, boring, he called out president biden before heading into the courtroom. watch this. >> make no miss take about it. i'm here because of crooked joe biden, the worst president in the history of our country. he's destroying our country. this country is being destroyed rapidly. it's not slowly. rapidly. the borders, on energy, on inflation, on everything you can name. afghanistan removal. and he's also destroying it with weaponization. maria: congressman, you were at the trial last week. what's your reaction to the closing arguments, what insight can you share with us in terms of what you witnessed or do you think the jury will be fair here? how will they deliberate? >> you know, a lot of it's going to come down to the judge's instructions. if this was a case on the merits we would look at a chance of acquittal here but this judge has put his finger on the scale in so many ways and being in the courtroom a couple hours you can

see the difference between what he was sustaining in the way of objections versus upholding for the prosecution or defense. i like to think the jury would see to that. it was pretty blatant and they seemed to be paying attention and taking the role seriously. but we'll see. you know, these instructions are going to weigh heavily on it and the fact he would not let a witness come, an expert in election law, when they're coming up with an obscure crime that president trump aledgedly committed, this -- he would be the first person ever to have committed crime and be tried on it because it's an invented crime but we'll be watching instructions for sure because that could weigh heavily on the jury. i'd like to think we'll see at least a hung jury and president trump be able to continue his campaign and continue to work for the american people. maria: your colleague, new york republican congresswoman elise stefanik is breaking news this morning, she is saying that she wants an investigation of what

she -- she's saying she's filing a misconduct lawsuit against judge merchan overseeing this trial right now, congressman. do you have questions about the judge in terms of why he is the judge taking on this case. stefanik seems to feel there's misconduct here. she's filing suit this morning. >> certainly. from his own personal campaign donations to his daughter and what she to raise money, you start with the political bend. you add to that, the gag order, yoyou add to that what he's done to sustain, not allowing testimony from the defense, toed that the instruction he's giving the jury, there's a clear, clear bias in this. it's really unfortunate. our whole way of life here in the united states is based on the rule of law and he is no doubt pre vert ago that. maria: -- perverting that. maria: she wants to call for an

investigation to determine whether the random selection process was followed when merchan was handed the case brought against mr. trump by alvin bragg. we don't know how that process took place but she says it wasn't random at all. >> well, it would honestly be surprising if it does, if it was, i should say. maria: congressman, thank you. we'll be following all of that. thank you very much for being here. quick break and then more on president trump's new york trial. we expect the judge to give the jury instructions today, then they will deliberate. former federal prosecutor andrew turkaski is here with reaction. you're watching "mornings with maria" live on fox business. stay with us. ♪ s

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maria: welcome back. former president trump's' new york trial resumes today at 10:00 a.m. eastern. judge merchan will give instructions to the jury which should take about an a hour. they'll begin deliberating until 4:30 p.m. today and will continue tomorrow. deliberations could last from a few hours to a few weeks. trump's attorney spending the image out of closing arrestingments attacking cohen's credibility, calling him the gloat, the greatest liar of all ttime. the prosecution defended the importance of daniels' testimony saying it illustrated the motive for the crime. joining me is andrew cherkasky, a former federal prosecutor, thank you so much for being here this morning. >> thank you. maria: tell us what you gleaned from all a of this, what's most important, what should we be aware of? >> i think todd blanche gave the

jury everything they need in order to reach an acquittal, reach a verdict of not guilty in the case and i think that's very justified under the circumstances. the prosecution failed entirely to prove some of the basic elements of the crime here, specifically that the entry into the business records of legal expenses was incorrect. not even a question of whether donald trump had a criminal intent in mind but whether that should have been anything else and being on fox business i think that most business people know you book your expenses. why wouldn't you book an expense to a lawyer as a legal expense. if they can't get over that hurdle they don't have a conviction so i think they're set up for an you aquital but it's -- an you acquittal. but it's new york. it's a blue jury. they could have holdouts. this could go any direction. i think the most interesting thing that could happen is a hung jury and what would happen after that. maria: yeah, a hung jury those be a victory for trump even though they'll have to do a mistrial, right? you. >> you think of it as being a

victory for trump but then the da's office would have the option of retrying him and they likely would. alvin bragg isn't likely to pull back. maria: no, he's not. >> at this point. so then if it's a retrial, they can go back to trial almost immediately and i think judge merchan could order this back to trial ahead of the november election and so we could be going through this all over again because they don't have to do new discovery, new motions, anything like that. they could be back at trial doing this all over before the election if it's a hung jury so i don't know if that's the best outcome for trump. maria: so it's either a hung jury or of unanimous guilty or not guilty. >> that's right. maria: what do you think, mike. >> you worked at the justice department. have you seen anybody that's like the number two, three or four leave that political appointee post to become a live prosecutor in the city? >> this looks like a plant. you see from time to time certain people come in and out of the justice department and they go to kind of a specialized

job or more specialized job within the government somewhere you usually go from the state. but the idea that co-angelo isn't part of the greater biden conspiracy to take down donald trump, that's preposterous. he's at the center of it. for judge merchan to have gagged donald trump on coangelo specifically, he's a political player at this point. i find that to be outray just. outrageous.maria: you said thel instructions the judge gives to the jury is the most important thing that happens. >> that's right. the judge is telling the jury how to apply the facts to the law, what the big decisions are. so when you take the law in this case and you look at some of the confusion that's been there and we've all been complaining about it since the beginning, commentators on the left and right. we don't understand what the crime is, not only do we not understand kind of the basic idea of why they think the misdemeanor is there but they have to have an elevating second offense and the second offense has been kept a secret the whole

time. the defense demanded further clarity on that. they refused to give it. the judge hasn't required it. as they get into the instructions the judge is instructed the members they don't have to have a unanimous verdict as to their theory as to the secondary offense and so we really have some outrageous kind of legal gymnastics going on, all of which would be ripe for appeal and i think very strong appeals but if he's convicted i don't see any way gets to the appellate court before the election so there would be a conviction hanging over him, maybe overturned after he becomes the next president or loses the election, potentially because of this verdict. the degrees of unfairness and injustice that are going on i think are really troubling and those jury instructions are center to some of the problems that we have here. maria: that is just extraordinary he that this is taking place right now. how do you see it? >> i have to agree with andrew. i'm terrified about the jury

instructions. when you look at the crux of this, judge merchan refuses to let the jury know that hush money payments are not illegal that is important. what is hush money. there's settlement agreements. reporters do it all the time. they worked on the clinton campaign. they catched and killed many, many stories and there's nothing wrong with that. there's nothing illegal with these type of settlement agreements but the judge is refusing to allow that instruction to a jury so there's so much kaye kaye gloss that -- chaos in that jury room. i'm hoping that deliberations only take a couple hours. there's two lawyers. i have full faith that they can weave through some of the instructions and say here's the crux, business records. maria: there were phi works this week. judge merchan reprimanded trump's lawyer during closing arguments yesterday. blanche told the jury they can't send someone to prison based on the words of michael cohen. merchan calling the statement out ray just, highly inappropriate because jurors are not allowed to take punishment into consideration when

deliberating. elise stefanik filed a misconduct complaint against judge merchan insisting his selection to handle trump's case is not random, calling on the inspector general to investigate. andrew, what are your thoughts on this? this is the same judge that oversaw steve bannon and other areas of trump's world. i mean, wasn't random that they selected him, was it? >> no. i think we've got deep issues in the new york judicial process of getting judges selected. has to be neutral and independent, those be random -- has to be random. doesn't appear to be that way. he tones be put on trump cases one after another. sounds like there's some shuffling and poker playing going on within the judiciary to make that happen so i think that investigation is very important and then yesterday when we saw judge merchan kind of go after todd blanche, calling his argument outrageous, that's way over the top. that's an easy mistake to make as a defense counsel.

you can say be very careful before you take away his freedom and liberty and so to say jail, to kind of work that in there, i think it's a very general generic referring to the idea of condemnation by a jury. don't condemn this man. it has great consequence. to say that mentioning jail versus liberty liberty, justice, freedom, i think it's over-the-the top to call it outrageous and lambast the way he did. maria: it does mean jail. >> not necessarily. he could -- donald trump could avoid jail with a conviction here. and so i do worry that by mentioning that, it almost invites merchan to send him to jail because his attorney said so, your attorney said you would go to jail if the you were convicted and there's mixed opinions i think in the legal community as to whether this crime under these circumstances calls for jail time and i think merchan has a very heavy task, if there's a conviction, to decide if there's any jail time,

a day, week, month, whatever is put in front of him. this does not call for jail time in most circumstances. maria: that would be a new low for this country. >> after the civil trials and now this, why would anyone have any faith in the new york state judicial system? >> can you imagine doing business in new york with any type of political magnifying glass on you? i mean, it's at a point at a this time where everything that's been done to donald trump i think screams to business folks in new york that this is a very precarious place to be and the politics that you bring to the table will have a direct impact on how the state investigates you and the potential they try to put you in jail where they don't do that to compatriots who are politically favorable. maria: does the jury hear this? is the jury going to say listen, if i really discuss how i

actually feel, this is unfair, he should be acquitted, they'll come after me? >> i have faith in the jury system. i might be the fool. i've been doing legal work for a couple decades now and i've had hundreds of ju juries and most often come back in a just way so i have to have faith in them in order to continue my job and stay sane but there are issues and there are concerns here in new york. there's two attorneys on there. there's also other very intelligent folks. there's very practical folks. they promised to be fair. maria: but the white house already said we're pla planning attacks on trump if gets acquitted. to say that before the jury is about to deliberate, that's outrageous. you want to having outrageous, judge merchan, that's outrageous, for the white house to say we're planning attacks on trump should he be acquitted. the jury hears that, says i don't want to get attacked. >> everything i heard on the panel signifies this is a political process, it's what i

hear from regular people watching it, what i hear from members of congress, that's why you see chairwoman stefan m nick trying to weigh in, move the oversight forward. >> there's so many things to unpack with the way that the country reacts and responds the verdict, whichever way that goes. if it's an you acquittal, i think people have to at that point admit there's a true injustice. now you've got the biden administration not ready to do that, i'm sure. i'm sure they'll have their own attack. well, he was put on trial and that means he's at least somguilty,trying to distort tha. if he's convict, they'll try to run around that over and a over again. and finally the hung jury potential and a mistrial, do we go back there, and how do they take all of the other trials that are going on and try to capitalize on those, it's law fare. i think that's the bottom line. we're deep in a law fare system and it's a real ooh problem. maria: yeah, it sure is.

andrew, thank you so much for your insights. we appreciate it. andrew cherkasky joining us. another broken promise from the democrats, the california officials now trying to delay the minimum wage pay bump. we've got details on the other side of the break. you're watching "mornings with maria" live on fox business. stay with us. ♪ maria: this week on "mornings with maria," tomorrow, house majority leader steve scalise moving to keep trump tax cuts in place, his plans to bypass the democrats' opposition. and friday, the power hour is back, kellyanne conway and kevin o'leary head to head on the day's biggest headlines. it's all right here on "mornings with maria."

her uncle's unhappy. i'm sensing an underlying issue. it's t-mobile. it started when we tried to get him under a new plan. but they they unexpectedly unraveled their “price lock” guarantee. which has made him, a bit... unruly. you called yourself the “un-carrier”. you sing about “price lock” on those commercials. “the price lock, the price lock...” so, if you could change the price, change the name! it's not a lock, i know a lock. so how can we undo the damage? we could all unsubscribe and switch to xfinity. their connection is unreal. and we could all un-experience this whole session. okay, that's uncalled for.

maria: welcome back. well, black listed chinese companies are reportedly rebranding themselves to skirt u.s. restrictions and regulations. cheryl casone with details now. cheryl, incredible. >> it's really interesting. the wall street journal is reporting this morning that these chinese companies are, quote, trying to buffer

themselves from washington's anti-china policies, they're rebranding and creating u.s. businesses to sell their wares as the biden administration expands the government entity list that restricts chinese company business dealings in the us. the lawyers say chinese companies setting subsidiaries with new names or rebranding is actually legal which creates a headache for regulators, national security experts are recommending sanctioning entire sectors instead of individual firms to prevent this from happening. well, back to the weather, one person is dead and seven are injured and another is still missing after a natural gas explosion at a high rise building in youngstown, ohio yesterday. this blast blowing the facade off the 13 story building which houses a bank on the ground floor, apartments above it. first responders finding the body of a 27-year-old employee in the rubble overnight.

the search for a missing woman remains ongoing. officials believe she was not at the building at the time of the explosion. star pga golfer back in court today for another hearing. the jefferson county attorney's office will be addressing the court about number one golfer in the world, the attorney's office ah has not indicated what's going to be aaddressed today. the prosecution and the defense agreed on the announcement. scheffler was arrested before round two of the pga championships, . it's going to be interesting what happens today. and then there's this, call important why democrats are change -- california democrats are racing to delay a new law that would pay healthcare workers a $25 minimum wage. it was scheduled to go into effect at the end of the week. the governor's office estimated it would cost the state $4 billion. newsom signed a law in october.

at the time he was warned about the high price tag. the budget deficit, staggering, $45 billion. the wall street journal editorial board writes this, democrats shrug when healthcare providers warn that the wage mandate could force cuts to patient services but now democrats worry that the state's higher health costs could force bigger government spending cuts. oh, no. don't cut our budgets. you know, make sure that all those greedy hospitals pay more. i can't -- sometimes i think about the california legislature and i think what are they smoking sometimes, but anyway. maria: all right. cheryl, thank you. we are looking at a market that is selling off. we did get a big deal in the oil sector. i wanted to get your take on, mike. conocophillips acquiring marathon oil in a $17.1 billion all stock deal right after the chevron hess deal as well. >> look, a lot of consolidation

in had this industry is coming. it is a -- with the price of oil being so high and companies vilified by the government they're now looking at how do i maximize returns for shareholders, how do i clean up my balance sheet, looking for efficiencies and capital returns of it's an unbelievable time to be an investor in the oil industry. i don't think we're anywhere near tends of this. maria: mike, i want to thank you for being here this morning. great to have you. i know you're ending this hour but you're going to come back soon. >> yes. maria: mike lee. brian brenberg is here as a special guest panelist for the rest of the morning. he's walking in right now, brian brenberg on set. you're watching "mornings with maria" live on fox business. stay with us. [introspective music] recipes. recipes that are more than their ingredients. ♪ [smoke alarm] recipes written by hand

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