CNBC Business News Update - Market Open: Stocks Higher, Investors Wait For Fed Rate Decision And Commentary, Ships Move Through Hormuz 6/17/26

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

The CNBC Business News Update with Jessica Ettinger features market numbers & news with CNBC expert analysis and sound from top business names. Updated throughout the business day. Visit https://www.cnbc.com/ for more. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Jessica Ettinger. CNBC, Wall Street has turned mixed. Ahead of a Fed announcement that's forecast to be a hold for interest rates, Kevin Warsh's first rate announcement as Fed chairman, 2 p.m. Eastern. The Dow in the green, up 208 points Caterpillar shares leading at higher. They're up 1.8% this morning. The S&P 500 index is up a point. The NASDAQ has tipped into the red. It's down 21 points.

Mixed. Chip shares this morning. We've got Broadcom of 4% and Nvidia shares slipped into the red. Just before 10 a.m. Eastern SpaceX shares did something they'd never done before. Teetering there on the verge of actually showing a negative print. Look at that. There's SpaceX, of course. We're going to continue to keep...

Oh, my God. That's not loud? Get someone on the phone. What's happening there? Let me get someone. Yeah, that can't be. That's the first time ever. by the way. That's CNBC's David Faber and Mad Money host Jim Kramer. SpaceX shares falling about

4 percent, still up 20 percent since the initial public offering last Friday at $150 a share. President Trump says the U.S. will go right back to dropping bombs if he doesn't like the Iran deal. Three full Iranian oil tankers have exited the Strait of Hormuz for the first time in months. Speaking at the G7 meeting in France, the president noted the memorandum of a memorandum of of understanding to be formally signed on Friday is not final. It's a 60-day peace pause that does not address Iran's nuclear program and allows for negotiations. Based on just reading this the available memorandum of understanding, I mean, you can't have a lot of confidence. This deal is giving away a lot of U.S. leverage. I mean, it's paying a high, very high price to get

the straight of Hormuz open. And there isn't going to be a lot of leverage left to deal with the nuclear questions and the language in the memorandum of understanding isn't very good. I mean, it's not even using kind of the standard language that's been developed to, say, a country shouldn't develop or test or manufacture or produce nuclear weapons. It just uses the word produce. And we know from experience that that creates loopholes. And countries have exploited that. Iran included.

That's the Institute for Science and International Security President David Albright on CNN. NBC. Meantime, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Salesforce all have executives at the G7 meeting, a signal of where power sits, says the Council on Foreign Relations, Jessica Brent, to CNBC. Retail sales for May shot higher, boosted by soaring gas prices and the highest inflation in three years, as consumers paid more for almost everything. Do remember there's an inflationary element, of course, in retail sales. We need to pay attention. to headline number expected to be up six tenths of a percent comes in stronger up nine tenths of a percent knowing that gas prices were up about what seven percent in may which is a couple percent

more than they were up in april so gas station sales are going to boost this number and indeed they did that's cnbc's rick santelli and cnbc senior economics reporter steve leesman notes that americans got bigger tax refunds over the past few months and that may have helped them spend I'm looking at a report from Pantheon, which said you had refunds of $18 billion in March, 21 in April, but the added gasoline cost was $9 billion and $11 billion, respectively. So there was money left over. What did consumers do? What do consumers always do?

They spent it. So the question becomes if those refunds were fueling the strong retail sales numbers, is it come off a little bit come June now? Jessica Eddinger, CNBC.