perch of the world's global reserve currency and the top global economy, they seem to sink further and further and further. i've never seen a second act when it comes to this. let's find ways to the keep america bonging for as long as we can. the thing is, it won't be an accident. we must make sure that we remember how we got there in the first place, and this way we will stay there. cheers. i think liz claman would agree with me. liz: you look great to me, although the i went to the an orange theory class over the weekend, could barely walk the next day. [laughter] we're all getting older, right? charles: got that do what we gotta do. liz: t-minus, what, about two and a half hours before a crucial meeting that could have major implications for the markets. with nine days left before the treasury department sayings -- says the u.s. will default on its debt obligations unless

republicans and the biden administration can come to the a deal to lift the borrowing limit. that 5:30 p.m. eastern time meeting between president biden and speaker of the house kevin mccarthy to hash out an agreement takes on added urgency. but we do have this breaking in the last couple of minutes, reuters is reporting that speaker mccarthy just told reporters that while nothing is yet agreed to the, it is possible, he said, to get a debt ceiling deal as soon as monday night or tuesday and that he actually believes the debt ceiling package being negotiated now would be acceptable to a majority of house republicans. we need to stress majority, because there are blocs on both the democrat and republican side that could hold whole thing hostage. but far apart on where to cut spending is the problem. at the bottom of the hour, we're going to get you the very latest live from washington, d.c. where chad pergram, arguably the most connected congressional reporter around, is going to get us the

very latest. you cannot point to one thing driving the markets as we kick off the final hour of trade because there are multiple headlines that has the dow jones industrials down 55 points while the s&p, the nasdaq and the russell are all in the green. let's sprint through the dow drag. there is a reason i said sprint, because that usually requires running shoes, and it's nike that got the dow's feet stuck in cement. shares at the very bottom of the blue chips here, down 3% or $3.54 to $111.22 the on a drown grade to the an outright sell by williams trading. nike's u.s. business in the current quarter has become, quote, far more difficult than what was expected when it reported its major fiscal q3 earnings beat in late march. williams slice ared the price target from $120 to 95, well below where it stands right now, of course, at 11 1 1 1 1 1

1111 -- 111 and change. wow, look at pac west. forget zions, it's up 5.75, pacwest now up 21%. and, in fact, we put a bunch of regionals up here because many of them look good, comerica up 3%, metropolitan the bank up 9. pete: -- 9%. pacwest has unloaded $2.6 billion in construction loans that were the on their books, selling them to disstress thed real estate investment firm kennedy wilson. but big ec is grabbing big headlines, apple slightly down at the moment, down about half a percent on a downgrade, which is rare. a hold on slowing demand for iphone handsets which could threaten its june quarter performance. on the other hand, let's look at meta, it is hitting a 5 2- week high this session adding another 1.33% to the its absolutely paraing bolick year to date gain of 107% on the unveil of its new

whatsapp feature that allows you to edit your sent messages up to the 15 minutes after you've sent them. and hopefully the ones you want to get back haven't been read yet within that 15 minutes. star torrey funds' dan niles told you months ago to take a long position in meta. he still has his, but now he's paring it with a short on a huge tech stock. you will want to hear his new long-short trade and, by the way, dan beat both the s&p and nasdaq last year by a long shot, so stay tuned. no fewer than five fedheads are out today trying to the outshout each other on why and whether the federal reserve will raise rates for an 11th time at upcoming june meeting. very few on wall street can tackle all of what we've just laid out for them, so we landed one of them. global strategist david kelly. david, five of these people? only one is a voting member, but

lots of conflicting messages have investors wondering how to the proceed. tell me what you glean from all of them, and we'll be rotating through some of these on the screen. >> well, what we've seen is since the last meeting a lot of these fed officials now are making speeches. we've seen a lot of them talk in the last few days. ask overall, i think the majority of them are saying, look, we think we can probably pause in june. we want to hold, wait to see some data. i'm looking at some of data they're going to the see between now and their june meeting both on employment which i think will be moderate and inflation which i think is going to be the very good. i think it's going to come down to the low 4s for may and and actually down to the low 3s for june. and if that's right, then i think the federal reserve can pause here. i think the message on average from these fed officials will be that they can pause here, although they do sound ready to raise rates further if they think inflation's not conquered. liz: now, barkin of the richmond

fed is not a voting member, but what he said was very similar to to the some of what we've heard the most hawkish members say, and that was today. still looking to be convinced that inflation is in zed decline. steady decline. that kind of matches what st. louis fed bullard told "the wall street journal" yesterday in an exclusive interview yesterday. he said the fed will have to the hike rates perhaps 50 basis points on more. that doesn't mean they don't pause? uni-- in june, but you to can't send the signal that a pause is a pivot. if you're an investor, how do you proceed when it comes to equity investing? >> i feel like these guys should just look at a chart on inflation. the inflation rate has fallen for 10 consecutive months. it's going to fall on a year-over-year basis for another 2 the consecutive month, by the time it's done, it's going to be down 60-70%, so that sounds like pretty steady progress to me. but you're right, some of these

officials still sound very hawkish. i just think they're completely misreading the situation. the only way you get inflation to drop like a rock is have a big recession. there's no need to have a big recession here. otherwise it's like a slinky coming down the stairs, it just comes down steadily, and that's what it's doing. by the end of next year we're going to be down to 2%, i think by 2025 the, we're going to try to get it up, not down. i wish they were more patient here. liz: are there areas if we cosee one or two more hikes that could really do well in an individual portfolio here? i ask that because i know what you just said, that inflation peaked. what, last june. but i have to tell you, prices are still very high. if you look at the cpi, the ppi, they're a couple of percentage points above the fed's 2% target rate. >> well, yes, on a year-over-year basis, but there are things particularly in the cpi and looking at shelter costs, but, you know, to your

point, the question you asked, what should investors do, if the federal reserve mistakenly raises rates some more, i think you got to take a very defensive position here. we know that these higher rates are causing real problems in commercial real estate, you know, notwithstanding what the regional banks are doing today, i anytime it -- think the it causes real problems in the regional banking system. there's a lot of fiscal drag here. if there's a deal on the debt ceiling, that's good the news, but it's probably going to involve cuts in government spending, and we'll also see student loan repayments start up again. all this tells me the economy is softening, and, you know, if we push rates think higher, the danger of a recession grows. so you want to be the very defensive. i think technology will probably do pretty well in that environment. technology likes low rates. and i think that's what we're eventually going to end up with. the higher the fed goes now, the more they're going to have to cut in 2024 and 2025. liz: good to the see you, david, thank you so much. >> anytime.

liz: he was just talking about big tech? okay, we need to get back to two big tech stories. apple got downgraded, we have some major news on micron, and a.i. stocks are rocketing higher on something microsoft cofounder bill gates just said in the last hour at a goldman sachs event. let's get trader kenny polcari this here. kenny, an hour ago gates declared the winner of the a.i. race will replace search engines, productivity tools. we kind of knew about the productivity tools, but search engines? we also knew that people might go to chatgp instead of google.com to do their searches. but he's also saying amazon-style e-commerce is going to be the completely disrupted. as we look at a bunch of a.i -- i'm not talking about just apple and microsoft, but c3ai is charging higher, sound hound, they're rocketing higher. is this sort of that that motor vehicle where you say you've got to be in at least some form of

a.i.? >> i think you should have said that, you know, a couple of months ago, that you had to be in it at some point, right? st the only got more heated up as we go from from week the weeking honestly. what started out in december when they introduced chatgpt and it got all this excitement and we talked about being in the infancy in that space, and we're clearly still in the infancy, so you have to have some exposure to it. c3ai is a name that you ask and i have been talking about. i own it, i like it, i'll buy more of it. you're going to get exposure in all these other larger tech names, so google, microsoft, they're all participating. even the banks are participating. you're getting to exposure to a.i. in a range of stocks across a range of industries. liz: let me bring our attention to micron. so micron is falling, and the big story is -- i find this kind of interesting -- [laughter] you know, u.s. says, u.s. chip companies, we don't want you sending really important chips that do things that could

eventually be turned around by china to harm us. you can't sell those to china. so now china says we don't want your chips anyway, and that is for the moment hurting micron. but the chip sector has been on such a roll lately. is this sort of a one-time deal that trips them up? >> yeah, i just think it's a one-time deal. i think that the news, you know, because there's this big, you know, fight between the u.s. and china and chips and technology and intelligence and all that. so i think this is just a momentary blip. i think the u.s. semiconductor industry is fine, and i actually think it's going to do better in the months ahead because it's all connected, once again, to the a.i. and you know what? i don't think we should be sending our chips to china. we should be keeping them here and using them for ourselves. liz: well, and we've got to flip it over apple really quickly. there aren't many opportunities to buy on a dip, and this is a teeny, tiny dip at the moment for apple -- [laughter] less than half a percent to the

downside on a downgrade because maybe the iphone is not moving as quickly as some had anticipated for this current quarter. so give me a sense here. i mean, the stock is year to date up about 34%, so not bad. >> yeah. liz: again, tiny opportunity here or not? >> no, maybe a tiny opportunity. but if you own apple already, which i do, you're participating in the move, right? so i'd like to see it pull back a little bit more because it's not like i don't have any exposure. i think apple is a core name, i would imagine most everybody has some exposure to apple. but any opportunity i get to buy apple on weakness is an opportunity the, i think, for the future. while this is a very small pullback, i wouldn't necessarily say this is the time. i actually think we're going to pull back, you know, over the next month when we figure out what the fed is ultimately going to do. liz: okay. until then, you and i are going to see a lot of each other, and we'll share that with our viewers as always. thank you, kenny. >> bye-bye. liz: it's the eve of hbo max morphing to just max.

the streamer airs the hit show the white lotus and the moniker change comes as hollywood is bogged down by striking writers who demand fair pay in the streaming world. and striking writers and their supporters pressed the mute button on david zaslav during his commencement speech at boston university. we're going to show you what happened here and speak with the media leader who helped launch rival paramount+. that is next. closing bell 48 minutes away. "the claman countdown" is coming right back. as we told you at the top of the hour, speaker mccarthy says maybe we get something to vote upon by monday night or tuesday on the debt ceiling deal. we're waiting for information, we'll get you a live report from d.c. in a minute. ♪

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>> and to my fellow recipients, it's an honor to the share this great day with all of you. [inaudible conversations] >> it's hard to the believe that almost 40 years have passed. liz: since he graduated from law school there. but you could hear them chanting pay your writers. boston university students heckled david zaslav yesterday as he delivered the commencement speech. that chant came as the chants and booing started even before he took the stage when during the introduction bu's president recognized his passion for sharing the human story on a global scale. yeah, the heckling began then. it is now day 21 of the writers' strike against the television and film studios. the main issue, paying the

writers more fairly in the new streaming world for those very human stories they were referencing. this on the eve of warner brothers-discovery's rebrand of its former hbo max streaming service, now known simply as max, and it is chock full of those passionate human stories writers have created. as streaming disrupts the way we consume entertainment and how those who create it get paid, let's bring in the founder and launched cbs all access which eventually became paramount+, and he is now the ceo of streaming technology company bright cove. very passion that it time for writers and for the substance that holds up streaming. what do you make of all that you're seeing? >> first of all, thanks for having me on, liz. i really appreciate it. the writers' strike is a unique moment here in time. they happen to have timed it what i think is probably the wrong time for the writers to be striking as large media companies that are now, you know, evolving their streaming services, they're running into cost pressure, and that cost

pressure being put on those streaming services means they don't want as much content to the right now, need as much content right now as they're trying to save money. so i it's going to be the a roughed road for the next few weeks and months as these things evolve. but i do think the major media companies are probably looking at it as an okay time to go through this fight relative to the nature of the spending they need to do. liz: it's almost a catch 22. they need more eyeballs, more subs and, therefore, to grab that the to you need the great shows like succession, like billions, which was interrupted twice last week by picketers and, of course, the unions that are not part of the writers' guild refuse to cross the line. so you're not going to get that content that attracts the eyeballs, right? >> look, i fundamentally believe you need the human element to that. i think a.i.'s going to help evolve storytelling and enable writers to write more and more diverse stories, but you're going to need the writers working at those companies. so i do believe it is going to

come around and be settled over time. but i think it demonstrates that cost savings that the big media companies need to the achieve need to be achieved some way. whether it's trimming the amount of content the, but more likely and part of why i took the job i did was to help them save on the technology spend. they've each gone out and build their own bespoke is, you know, sets of platforms to launch these big streaming services, the top six or seven companies. but a lot of that technology could be can outsourced to large vendors like ourselves who can really deliver the size and scale and capabilities for them to enable them to save that money. liz: which is what everyone from the bbc to harvard university, to roku is doing. they are coming to bright cove because you are a platform that the creates and then distributes that content so they don't have to. tell me exactly how you feel it's going, because if they're cutting costs, won't they just look for some gen-xer and say can you do it?

>> streaming is not just one piece of technology, it's a dozen things stitched together from encoding all the way to playout and the analytics and all the pieces in between. and it's not a simple system. we've bit -- built one over effectively a decade of being a public company and also 17 years as a company since service the launched. we have reliability, scalability, all the history that's gone with it. and we've done it for major companies. we do it for amc, bbc and also for enterprise. it's not just media -- liz: how to do you prove to them, to your customers, that you've increased viewership and there's a return on investment? >> yeah, the return we 2kweu6 to a major media company when we help them restructure their infrastructure for streaming, we help them save money. the largest new customer deal was just made, we can't announce yet, because they're still working through the money we're going to save them, and that's a mid six figure-style deal that they were spending like 5-10x

that on their infrastructure spending. so helping someone save 5-10x on infrastructure is massive. and we can really end help those companies. and we don't believe it's just six or seven streamers like we all talk about because they're the ones with the big content in those areas, it's 100 plus companies around the world that are major streamers that can be helped by saving that money. liz: well, i'm not going to ask you right out, but is it espn? there is word that disney is going to finally, worst kept secret, really make espn a stand-alone streaming service. and that may be a real shock for disney because people had it shove down their throats whether they wanted it or not in basic cable, and now you have to actually actively go out is and pay for that. >> yeah, they've been talking about that for years, trying to carve back the sports rights or carve out the rights that they need to be able to take the it direct to consumer. i think they will eventually do that while also not removing it from the bundle. they have smart people running that company, they understand the steps they're taking to be

able to maximize that. look, our view is that there's going to be the more growth, streaming is a growth industry despite the stories, everyone wants to say it's changed. what's happened is it's actually slowed down here in the u.s. in the big streamers, you know, growth rates. they've gone from double digits to single digits. but globally, we're talking about 66% of internet traffic is video streaming up from 55% last year. minutes streamedded is up 14% year-over-year, '21 to '22. it is a high double-digit growing industry globally. it's just in the you've seen this slowdown from what was effectively a big spike over the covid period. liz: so you short tv the screens. oh, my goodness, no, we need you. great to have you, mark. thank you very much. please come back and let us know when you can name that big client. >> we will. we will very soon. liz: interesting to watch the stock react. >> i hope so too. liz: pfizer's latest sal so in the weight loss drug wars has

that stock gaining serious weight. the results of its diabetes drug study as the company takes on semipick. closing bell, 36 minutes away. dow down 100 points, s&p clinging to a 5-point gain. the nasdaq up 71. we are coming right back. please don't move. ♪ ♪ m so glad we did this. i'm so glad we did this. i'm so glad we did this. i'm so glad we did this. i'm so... ...glad we did this. [kid plays drums] life is for living. let's partner for all of it. i'm so glad we did this. edward jones

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right now. we've got the dow jones industrials losing about 116 points, the s&p now clinging to to the just 2 points, 6 points. not much here. and we've got the nasdaq up 61. let's look at pfizer. we've got some individual stock the names, and this one's spiking at this hour by nearly 5% following positive results for its diabetes/weight loss drug. according to results from the phase two clinical trial that followed 411 adults with type ii the diabetes, the pharma company's oral drug, this is key, oral drug, resulted in weight loss that was comparable to patients' weight loss on ozempic and administered via injection. no southeast done down just about .25%. according to the alternative energy company, these european projects will be the first ever use of industrial scale green hydrogen in glass manufacturing,

aluminum recycling and steel manufacturing processes. foot locker getting kicked while it was already down, hitting a 9-month low at this hour after citi the gown grade -- downgraded the stock in the wake of disappointing earnings after friday's brutal selloff triggered by their full-yearer forecast cut, 2-day losses account for a total of 33%. draftkings reigning supreme at this hour, it's moving higher by about 5.25%, hitting a 5 the-week high after ubs upgraded the company from a neutral to a buy citing kraft expansion plans and positive outlook for growth and possibility, and they also said because the cleveland browns are going to win everything? [laughter] oh, they didn't say that. i accidental -- i mentioned that, and it wasn't true. ubs not the only one liking draftkings. top wall street tech the investor dan niles also giving a

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( ♪ ) with the push of a button, constant contact's ai tools help you know what to say, even when you don't. hi! constant contact. helping the small stand tall. liz: meta platforms hitting a 52-week high earlier today despite european union regulators fining the facebook parent a record $1.3 billion. the european data protection board says meta violated laws by transferring personal data of facebook users to servers in the united states saying it's not sufficiently protected from american spy agencies. susan li, give us more on global

fight to regulate how data moves across borders. >> well, i think it's obvious that the e.u. wants facebook and mark zuckerberg to to continue to pay up, and they're alleging meta is sending user data illegally across the atlantic to be stored in u.s. servers which might be vulnerable to u.s. spying. so meta says this really ultimately will hurt users. 225 the million of them using facebook on the european continent. and meta says without the ability to transfer data across borders, the internet risks being carved up into national and regional silos, restricting the global economy ask and leaving citizens in different countries unable to access many of the shared services that we have come to rely on. now, e.u. fines not new to mark zuckerberg's company, being ordered to to pay flarely $-- nearly $2.5 billion in the last nine months, data breaches of some kind for teenagers and advertising, etc. but it's not just meta, amazon

also ordered to pay nearly $900 million a few years ago, a accused of scraping user data to illegally use it for their advertising. both amazon and met that have both appealed their cases, but there is an e.u./u.s. data deal being negotiated, and this might actually speed up the implementation of that within the next six months. so if approved, that means tech companies like meta, google and amazon will still be able to keep transferring e.u. data back to the u.s. while giving european users more powers to challenge any spying. however, facebook might still have to pay up that billion dollar plus fine since it was for damages before a deal was signed. as you know, liz, money, rich tech companies can afford, of course. liz: yeah. is it really the algebra of deterrence? they really need to make those fines bigger if they're going to stop bad behavior. susan, thank you very much. satori fund founder dan niles

last november told us right here on "the claman countdown" that he was taking a long meta position. he is now paring that with another megathat a -- mega-cap tech stock. niles' hedge fund beat the s&p 500 and the nasdaq last year. his was up while the two indices, as you know, was down. i think the nasdaq was down 33% last year. niles is joining us now first on fox business. okay, dan, i'm guessing even with this e.u. snafu or situation you still really like meta. why? >> well, think when you look at it fundamentally, it's in probably the best position of all the big cap technology stocks when you look at it relative to its valuation. it's just above an s&p multiple of 19 times. their a.i.-driven advertising is doing really well, and so they're gaining back a lot of momentum after the issues caused

by the apple privacy steps taken. and then finally, their product that competes with tiktok, which is called reels, is doing incredibly well especially as, obviously, there's a lot of pressure on tiktok and will that be allowed in the u.s. and so i think it's the best positioned of all the big names when you look at it across those metrics. liz: but now you're paring it because you're a long-short hedge fund with a short against one of the biggest names in technology. i'll let you reveal it, and then i really need to know why. >> yeah. so when google reported, their stock went down the next day a little bit, not much, and we actually ended up buying it because our view was, welsh they did much better than people thought on his thing and all this talk about microsoft gaining share against google and google being behind in a.i., you know, just makes no sense. google has more training data than anyone on the prant. they're going to be -- on the planet, they're going to be just

fine. so we bought it. as the stock continued to go up, we had more and more concerns about advertising demand in general. you probably remember disney, how awful the advertising numbers were there. paramount, same situation. we think with the online market, we think you're going to see more pressure spreading to the online, that'll that'll affect both meta and google, but meta has advantage plus and reels to help offset that where google doesn't. and remember, we're a hedge fund, so i wouldn't be short google naked, but when it's paired against facebook where we have a much bigger position on the long side, this helps hedge out some of the the advertising risks that you're inherent ily taking being long facebook. liz: the big keyword right now is artificial intelligence. there was news that bill gates is speaking at a goldman sachs conference and he said that the race in technology now, the brutal survivor type of race, is who gets the best a.i. engine,

who gets to it first. and and he said whoever does will basically replace search engines because that's what artificial intelligence will do. now, both alphabet and microsoft have big operations this artificial intelligence. you don't hear that much about it coming out of meta, do you? >> well, remember with meta it's more about helping to optimize advertising. so where should your ad dollars go. their a.i. really helps with optimizing where those ad dollars go in the system. and so for us we're looking at different names, you know, we're looking at semiconductor names, obviously, nvidia's the one that everybody brings up, but we like intel as well. we look at intel, and you're to going to need a lot more cores in each of your server microprosers to be able to do genre rahtive a.i., and everybody hates intel which is great. unlike the optimism around amd

the or nvidia. i think the one thing you have to remember is bill gates also said, you know, many years agnew technology -- ago new technology's overhyped short term and underhyped long term. right now the hype around a.i. is pretty severe , and to you think about 2001, the internet obviously kept growing, was much bigger, didn't stop the nasdaq from going down 78%. a lot of these stocks, weaver had 7 stocks in the s&p 500 that have driven all the gains for the year driven by optimism if around a.i. in general. the rest of the s&p's down for the year. liz: right. >> and so, you know, i'm getting a little concerned this hype is going to overrun reality in the near term, but long term, absolutely, this is just going to change the entire landscape as we move forward -- liz: in fact, on friday our guested had said it's now not fang, but manon, microsoft, apple -- you know, these sort of

strung together initialses of all of it. let me just tell you what is hitting the tape. tiktok has filed a federal lawsuit existence the montana -- against the state of minnesota in a court filing. so, obviously, montana has banned the use of tiktok. now, that's a whole ball of wax that you start to put president together or an entire jar of scorpions you met out, when a state is banning a web site kind of thing. how do you think that affects meta if this is an aclu issue and a free speech and let me search what i want issue and tiktok survives or at least drags out its ability to live here in the united states? >> well, remember this really gained some momentum when the government banned tiktok on a lot of government devices. and so i fine it really odd that the -- find it really odd that the government takes the position we don't want it on our devices, but we're okay with the citizen citizen -- citizens in the u.s. having it on theirs.

to me, that makes absolutely ono sense. [laughter] i think if you think about this longer term, this is going to continue to be an overhang for tiktok and a positive, i think, for meta going forward. but even before this really started to pick up momentum, you go back to the september quarter of last year and the stock got hammered down in the low 90s, and they had very strong momentum against tiktok back then. that's why we ended up buying it in addition to cap-x expectations that we thought would be cut later. that's just continued. the momentum in that product is continuing to do well. and at a market multiple. unlike a lot of these generative a.i. plays that are trading at, you know, much higher than market multiples, this is one when you kind -- where you kind of get a benefit in the background. that's why i think it makes sense to stay involved, and the momentum against tiktok, i think, will continue. liz: and the word meta verse may become just like nfts which not a lot of people are talking

about anymore. dan, great to have you, thank you very much. took the position in meta back in november, it's up 107% year to date. thank you, dan. >> thanks, liz. liz: the biggest market-moving event happening after the session closes. president biden will meet with house speaker kevin mccarthy to, hopefully, hammer out a debt ceiling deal so the u.s. does not do something it has never cone in its history, default on our obligation. our correspondent, chad pergram, has been coarsing through the halls of congress working the phones. he's got exclusive details next on what he's hearing on the hill right now. closing bell 14 minutes away. we've got the dow down 117. we already told you the tiktok news, we old you the apple news -- told you the apple news. so much going on. you've got to stay with us, there's even more. ♪ muck

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♪. liz: okay. let's call it an hour and nine minutes. president biden and house speaker kevin mccarthy set to meet in the oval office just over that time to come one a solution to avoid the u.s. defaulting on its debt for the first time in history. can they get it done ahead of the looming june 1st deadline where treasury says

that's when all hell might break loose. chad pergram joins us from capitol hill. i know you've been working phones, combing the hallways. what are you hearing? >> house speaker kevin mccarthy says it is not good to govern by crisis of the he will cancel the house recess next week if necessary, if they get a deal the house is ways away from acting. >> i thought it would be important to have it done this weekend, the timeline, i will not shorten it. i think members have 72 hours reading any bill. the house has to make it right, the senate has to pass it too. that is why waiting until the last minute is not the way to govern. >> reporter: mccarthy's deputies met with president biden's team for several hours at the capitol had morning. everyone is circumspect about the talks. >> what are we expecting today, steve? >> we're going up to work.

>> how much further do you have to go? is everything going to hinge on the meeting this afternoon with the president? >> i'm sorry i don't have any other comments. >> reporter: it is believed that mccarthy needs at least 180 to 200 of his members to vote yes. gop leaders aren't willing to discuss what happens if mccarthy gives up too much. >> if there is anything less than 180 gop votes, could he be up for another speaker vote again if that happens? >> listen, kevin mccarthy's leadership yielded an incredible win with the debt ceiling bill that was passed more than a month ago, david. the administration, wall street, nobody thought republicans could do that. we did. >> reporter: the gop touts the house debt ceiling bill ironically fox is told that bill could handcuff mccarthy in the talks. gop members are increasingly unwilling to accept any deal short of the bill the house approved in april. and, liz, listen to this

something in the talks, something they are negotiating right now, is closing the carried interest loophole. that means more revenue. that is something that is very important to the democrats. >> well it was important to president trump when he was president back in late december of 2017. we remember specifically him saying, close that loophole, that really only benefits the uber wealthy, private equity hedge funds, et cetera, and somehow the lobbyists managed to close it. so -- >> reporter: that is big selling point to the democrats if they get this in. maybe that is what they need to get votes on their side of the aisle. liz: that is an interesting take. thank you very much, chad pergram. closing bell, we're five minutes away. quick check on the shares of brightcove. we were just interviewing the ceo. the stock hit a session high during the interview with him. mark was talking about the company and how as a big social media platform that companies use to kind of handle all of

their social media and disseminate it, that stock is now up about five 1/3%. big move there. to the broader markets, look at the dow jones industrials shrill lagging about 135 points to the downside. the s&p barely managing to hold on to the green here. s&p had been flirting with a nine-month high. it has to close above 4198. doesn't look like that might happen. nasdaq, up 56 points, closing at highest level have to go back to august 18th to see that. nasdaq coming off four weeks of gains. we'll see what happens. big lineup tomorrow, big officer from blackrock is here, rick reider is joining us. he will talk about what about the one-month t-bill everybody is piling into? is that the appropriate trade you should be in as we wait to hear what happens with the debt

ceiling discussions? haven capital's kyle bass, is is always outspoken. everybody listens to him on wall street and let's just stay tuned for that. right now, stephanie lang on the trades that she is looking at right now. we just got everybody that news, stephanie what is going on or not happening certainly in washington, d.c. but it is important sometimes to tune that out and forge ahead. how are you importanting ahead? what's your path? >> well, i think you have to recognize what's going on. you mentions the debt ceiling and what people aren't talking about is the fact when this happened in 2011 the market dropped you know, over 10% and so that's the near term worry we have. longer term we have recession in mind. you got to be in a defensive position. that sounds really boring right now, when tech is going sky-high. we really think we'll be well-positioned because we are a little bit nervous.

we have a inverted yield curve. we have earnings going down. we have, you know, recession risks. so with health care we think that will be well-positioned. everyone needs their drugs. they need health care in the long run. then you also have consumer staples. it has had great pricing power. you also need to, your everyday items, you need food, you need your household items. so i think that if you defensively position you're going to be happier later this year, earlier next year when we see the economic pressure really come on board. liz: when you look at the xlv and xlf, xlp, rather, those are the etfs where you can buy baskets of consumer staples or health care names, you know, how do you feel about that? it is hard sometimes for retail investor to decide, wait do i want costco or do i want

walmart? why don't i get something that encompasses all of them? >> right and if you look back at, you know, these defensive positions, i think what's going to happen is right now you have all the momentum of tech but once the fed starts cutting rates which is typically very bad for the market, there is going to be a pile in into these defensive names and typically they outperform by double digits over the market. so i think it's very important to really make those broad swift changes when you see that economic downturn. it is going to, yes, the names are going to matter but it will have the biggest positioning between defensives and more cyclical names. i think it is important to be positioned in the defensive side of things. liz: gold breached 2000 pretty well. when there was word there might be a debt ceiling deal, people

fled gold and went elsewhere. not flee, but we have 1992 a troy ounce. do you look at commodities that type of way as some kind of protection. >> the broadcom index are really dominated by energy which of course is under pressure this year. liz: yeah. >> we're not fans of gold as a defensive property. we would rather go into names that have these cash flow properties. liz: okay. >> that have reasonable valuations and that you have cash flow. [closing bell rings] liz: good to see you, stephanie. great to have you. the dow is one outlier in the red. s&p might be too close to call. we'll see you tomorrow. ♪ larry: hello, folks, welcome to "kudlow," i'm larry kudlow. we're waiting for a big sit-down between president biden and speake