Business Rundown: Jobs Data, Gas Prices, and Reasons to Remain Bullish on the Economy

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I'm Lou Bassanese, and this is the Fox Business rundown.

Friday, March 6, 2026, a big disappointment is February job numbers, miss expectations,

and show job losses.

So how should investors and policymakers respond?

I think this job's market is kind of hard to read.

It's not one that's necessarily getting much stronger, but it's not one that's falling

apart.

The Labor Department reports that the U.S. economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, falling

well short of the 59,000 job increase economists were predicting.

Private payrolls took the brunt of the hit, while health care employment also plummeted

amid widespread strikes.

Some sectors, however, weathered the storm, as state government jobs, social assistance

employers, and others saw gains.

Along with the losses, the unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%.

That's up one-tenth of a percent from January.

But the job's data isn't the only thing rattling the markets, as U.S. military operations

in Iran are shaking up global oil supplies and already impacting gas prices here at home.

So what does the February jobs report tell us about the American labor market?

And how will it impact what the Fed does next?

There are just crazy revisions going on.

If you remember, even with the prior month revised down to 126, it was way above last

month's expectations going in.

Michael Lee is the founder of Michael Lee's strategy.

This month is way below the lowest of expectations.

The consensus range this month was 35,000 to 125,000.

We came in at a negative 92 last month, I think the high end was 70 or 80, and even with

revised, we're at 126, so I am perplexed with the Bureau of Labor Statistics and their

job collection and method, especially the birth death adjustment that they make on a monthly

basis.

I just, to me, the BLS is at a hard time gauging that health of the labor market.

This has been a problem for a time since COVID.

So how do you, as investors, how do we respond in terms of the volatility?

I look at it.

The January report, I said, one good job report doesn't fix a week trend, just like

one warm day doesn't end winter, right?

So now we got a strong one a week one.

How do you think about that?

How do you think the Fed looks at the labor market now with this print?

I think until we get a new Fed share, they use it to influence the number or predetermined

conclusion they already had.

There's no one there, it's in to cut rates until later this year, so I think the Fed

is pretty confirmed with the Stamp Battle order and you kind of look at where this, you

look at where the 10-year treasury is, we were sub 4 last week, we go to war this weekend

and now we're back up at 415 level, which is not exactly high, but it's historically,

if you've got a really ugly jobs number like this, you would see that 10-year yield come

down in the price of bonds rally with the expectations of rate cuts, and we're just

not getting that.

And I'd say the feedback that we say got from the non-farm's jobs report, what you got

today, you know, six years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, was a lot more significant

because the number has made a lot more sense, and so all you could really do is look at

the continuing claims, and you think in this, that's the signal through the noise here,

I mean, look at the 10-year treasury yield, it's not plummeting on safe haven buying, right?

I mean, for people listening, it's a sea salt, right?

If you're buying bonds, prices go up, yields go down, so flight to quality.

So you think that's the real indicator, not really looking at the jobs number and the

continuing claims?

Yeah, well, and I don't also say if we weren't at war right now, and the price of oil

worked, wasn't on the ascent, you know, you would, instead of seeing the 10-year treasury

up at 415, we might see it at 390 or 395, with the hopes that the fed would cut rates,

and that interest rates would come down.

So I'm looking at the weekly jobless claims and the continuing claims, and there's just

not a lot of movement in there.

So I think this job's market is kind of hard to read.

It's not one that's necessarily getting much stronger, but it's not one that's falling

apart.

So that doesn't get the hell of the fed to act, right?

And then, unfortunately, for our listeners and us, everyday Americans, right?

That means interest rates aren't going down, so it's going to be still more expensive

credit card bills, auto loans, financing for companies, you run the gamut, but you brought

it up too.

We are at war right now, right?

We're seeing oil surge, some of its biggest single-day moves in years.

How do you think that impacts the economy?

What do you think is the outcome there?

How does the administration think about ending this swiftly, so it doesn't have too much

of an impact on the big issue of the day, right?

It's affordability for the last month, so now gas prices are rising.

How do you view that?

Well, fortunately, they're rising, gas prices are rising, they're rising from a low base.

The problem that becomes with the shipping lanes getting clogged up in that section of

the world.

And one of the oil experts from Qatar was out saying that, like, if something significant

doesn't happen in the next couple of days, that you could end up with $150 barrel oil,

right?

And JP Morgan came out with some sort of similar tone yesterday saying, like, hey, there's

excess on the shelf in a lot of different places, but some places, it's only a few days,

and some places, it's a few months.

And so once you start running through those excess hits, and the shipping lanes are shut

down, and you kind of put sand in the gears of this global oil trade, you could see some

massive temporary price spikes, and I think that all comes down to when this conflict

is settled.

And who knows what goes on behind closed doors?

The irons are talking publicly that they're dug in, secretary of war, Pete Hanks at the

saying, we could do this in September.

Like, we don't know where it's going to go.

The market was hoping for a quicker resolution, and I don't know that they're as confident

as they were earlier in the week.

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I want to go back to the JP Morgan prediction because I believe it was JP Morgan or Goldman

that maybe four or five months ago were predicting, you know, $50 barrel oil, and it's funny

how quickly they turn.

Just given, you know, you and I have some gray hairs to show it, we've lived through

a few Middle East conflicts and oil price spikes over the last couple decades.

Help the listeners understand how long do these things usually last like these oil price

spikes?

What's the net impact?

I mean, I think the last time we saw this was like 2013, 2014, where we had, you know,

$140 barrel oil predictions and then quickly it reversed course.

So do you think this is a set up here?

Once the war ends or there's a line of sight in the end of the war, oil prices are going

to reverse and get back into the, you know, low 60s high fifties?

Yeah.

So I think it has more to do with like the shipping lanes and the terminals imports.

So this war could continue on, but if in say two or three weeks, you can secure that

part of the world so that the shipping lanes can leave a natural gas.

And we've all those shipping routes around the straight of Hormuz.

If those could get back online and the oil production and there's no meaningful damage

to any of those shipping lanes, this becomes a temporary price spike where maybe I don't

know that it goes above 100, but if it does, it should be relatively short lived unless

the Iron Manion Army is able to really rain on, you know, rain down on those shipping

lanes, which I got to imagine is very near the top of the list for our defense departments

and the rest, you know, the other others in the region to clear that up, right?

Yeah, but they're just actively looking.

It's self-defeating purpose if they shut them down for too long, because that's the

revenue source, right?

If they shut down exporting oil, they don't have a revenue generator.

And, you know, ironically, if I, you know, in the last 10 years, the American energy independence

movement has actually made us less reliant here in the U.S. only about two and a half

percent, three percent, I think the data I saw of the oil flowing through the straight

outermost comes to the U.S. so we're in a more insulated situation.

But do you think Iran eventually has to cave and keep the straight open and really not

try and shut it because they need that revenue anyway as well?

I mean, the countries like China are big, you know, consumers, a lot of the Asian nations

of the oil that transports through there.

That will affect open market prices, because, you know, so China was like biggest buyer

for Venezuela, the biggest buyer for my land.

So now that they're not getting their oil, they're going to go elsewhere in the world,

and they're going to be the main buyer driving prices up.

And so that will affect.

So if, you know, if Brent Crude in the U.S. goes to $95 in a barrel, they're not going

to, like, you know, people at, you know, domestic companies aren't going to sell it for a discount

because we're not getting it from a country from the world.

No, that's fair point, fair point.

It's a supply-to-band driven market.

So let's change gears a little bit here and move to another area of the market that's

seen a ton of volatility in the tech trade and AI.

You know, we're closing out this earning season.

Are there any names in particular that you think investors are just getting wrong or

that put up great numbers and they're getting right?

So the first one is Core Weave.

So people are freaked out about Core Weave's debt.

And so what Core Weave does is they build data centers.

They put NVIDIA GPUs in and they rent them out.

And so they rent them out to the likes of Microsoft, to the likes of OpenAI, to Google, to Amazon,

to you name it, to Meta.

And they not only just rent these out, they have all sorts of software and services that

go along with it.

And so they're loading up on debt, well, why?

If you could build a data center for a billion dollars and bring in three billion dollars

of rent in five years, it's very good economics.

It's like building a billion, you know, a $10 billion apartment building and having a rent

roll of $600 million a year.

So you're saying it's better to finance it with debt than pay at a pocket with cash, just

the economic better?

Yeah, and the bulk of the debt they're taking on is to finance projects where they already

have tenets.

Right?

So you saw this a lot with people building warehouses for Amazon.

And instead of, you know, building a $10 billion warehouse and bringing in a million dollars

of rent, they're building a, you know, a billion dollar data center and bringing $600

million with a rent.

So the numbers are astronomical.

They get the seventh largest allocation of new NVIDIA GPUs when the new ones come out.

They are uniquely positioned in the space and the market just doesn't get it.

And based on the contracts they have signed now, revenues are going to increase fivefold

in two years.

Wow.

And they'll be pretty good 25% net margin at that time.

And that's not including the deal they just signed with Anthropics.

Well, that's one they're getting wrong.

And then today, if you look at Marvel, hold on.

Let's go to the core wave.

I got to qualify this with you because you were very early and very, very right on

Palantir.

Do you think core wave has the potential to palantir to use a poor pun there?

I mean, does it have that?

What?

Outside?

For our listeners, we're not making individual recommendations here, but we are looking

at opportunities in the market.

You think it has that type of potential?

Yes.

I think you've got a four to five X over the next two to two and a half years in that

stock, which is really, and the market will warm, in my opinion, to this debt financed.

Once they see the revenue coming on the other side in the profitability, that's going

to come because the demand for computes, which is the use of the video GPUs, the use of

Marvel GPUs, AMD, Broadcom, all these companies that make these GPUs would be doing a lot

more revenue if they could make products faster.

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Right.

Investors were bidding up on potential.

Now they actually want to see the revenue come through, which is funny.

It's a contrarian flip, which I'll bring it back to the jobs number we talked about earlier.

One was saying that with all this AI taking off software engineers and coders, those jobs,

we're going to disappear.

If you look at the latest data, they're actually increasing, which, what do you make of that?

We're here.

We're doing more and more compute.

We think vibe coding is going to put out coding, and coders aren't going to be needed

anymore, and yet postings on indeed.com are going higher for software engineers.

Yeah.

So that was just, so Citadel put this out yesterday, a chart where basically the job

listings for software engineers has gone parabolic to the upside, right?

So you can't hire enough of them, even though they're supposed to disappear.

And so the other one of that is so anthropic makes clawed and clawed code, and it's clawed

code, which has been used as the axe to chop down all these software and service companies.

One of them was Salesforce.

So Salesforce is a software and service company, and their stock has got absolutely demolished.

Do you like it though?

Do you think it can survive, or is it just a re-rating the whole software as a service

space?

It's going to be the evaluation multiples are going to change because of AI.

Well, you know, maybe it was too valued.

I'm not a huge Salesforce fan, but I can tell you anthropic is, because up until two

weeks ago, they had a job listing for a Salesforce administrator on their website.

So if anthropic and clawed are going to take out Salesforce as a company, why are they running

it internally to grow their business and hiring people to run it?

That's a great point, man.

I appreciate that.

It's a good perspective.

Listen, we got to wrap up this conversation, but you're ending on a high note too, talking

about jobs, right?

Focus on continuing claims, not the volatility in the headlines.

And what do you think?

I'll leave on this, your comments on this.

I saw a stat right before we came on that 1,000 point moves in the Dow by presidency.

There was one day under President Obama, I think 11 under President Biden, and we've

already had 25 under President Trump.

So how do you tell our listeners how to deal with that volatility?

That's the best strategy to have in these markets.

Look, you need to have an underlying view of where your own is going, right?

And if you're uncomfortable with this volatility, you need to own more cash and fix income

and things that don't move like that.

But if you have an underlying view on your unafraid to dollar cost average, this is going

to create unbelievable opportunities.

Awesome.

Well, I appreciate your perspectives and insight, Michael Lee, Michael Lee's strategy.

Thanks, buddy.