Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: Spending Is Up 3/19/25
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Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod, Brian Moynihan, head of Bank of America, with a word on the consumer. The consumer is saying I'm getting more pessimistic in some of the surveys and things like that. But if you actually look what they're doing day to day, they continue to spend, which means the economy ought to be holding up better than people think.

What the head of the nation's second largest bank is seeing in the economy, the new administration, and the I-word: inflation. It's sticky before the tariffs. The tariffs then add a nominal amount to it. They're not caught. It's the stickiness of inflation has been true.

And NVIDIA's day in the sun. What's in your cereal box? And the dramatic firing of two Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission. Our Eamon Javers reports from Washington. This is an administration that clearly is intending to test the absolute outer limits of presidential authority. They want to amass as much power as quickly as they can. It's Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now.

Stand back here by in three, two, one. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan. Andrew is out today. Yesterday was a down day across the board. It was the first negative session for three. But you saw the S&P pull back by over one percent. So we're continuing to watch that. I think at this point it's about.

8.7% below the all-time high for the S&P 500. It's not going to be a straight march back up. Still some volatility out there and a lot of questions about what comes next. I guess the question becomes, is this happening because of tariffs and uncertainty about what's happening in policy? Is this happening because of a potential slowdown when it comes to the consumer, when it comes to businesses?

And that's what we're going to try and dig into a little more today. We've got Brian Moynihan, the head of the Bank of America, who will be joining us to say what they are seeing with their 70 million accounts across America. Get a little better idea of maybe what's happening on the ground right now in real time. An interesting time because...

And certainty can be self-fulfilling in terms of what you do. But it's almost like there's nothing really wrong right now with credit, credit spreads, delinquency. But it could be. There could be. But right now we're just sort of in this weird holding. Yeah, I think. And that in psychological markets all about psychology anyway. And you were going over the.

The recent action in the markets, I'm good for a week, I think. You know how you did your pie thing the other day? How far did you go out? I think I could get it to 18, but I can't unless I get it done. 18, I can't do that. I know yesterday the market was down.

Monday, the market continued to go up. Friday, we had a big day up 650. That was a rebound from a horrible day on Thursday and Wednesday. Now I'm done. Well, I think you can walk away and say for the week we were down last week, we were up again Friday and Monday, though. But I'm good for about four. I'm good for about five days. And then it's like, OK, I'm starting a new week, a new week to watch. Then you fall to the OK, how far are we from the all time high? Right. That's what we fall back on. That's what's most important. It is.

Last year was the first year back that we did this live and it was like a rock concert and it was described, GTC was described as the Woodstock of AI and this year it's described as the Super Bowl of AI.

NVIDIA announcing a slate of new chips and software for building and deploying artificial intelligence. The shares of the AI giant ended yesterday, trading down more than 3%. Company CEO Jensen Huang revealing what the company is calling the Blackwell Ultra, which will ship in the second half of the year. This is an update to NVIDIA's current flagship device called the Blackwell. It will feature more memory than the current model.

helping it to support even larger AI models. Wang also revealed NVIDIA's next generation chip called Vera Rubin. That must be someone very important in the, I don't know. I thought about that immediately. I knew it was Rubin. I didn't know. Vera Rubin, yeah. Oh, an American astronomer. Yeah. It will begin shipping in the second half of next year. You say it. Rubin was an American astronomer who helped further scientists' understanding of dark matter.

in his signature black leather coat, Wong addressed attendees at Nvidia's week-long GTC event. AI is going through an inflection point. It has become more useful because it's smarter, it can reason,

It is more used. You can tell it's more used because whenever you go to chat GPT these days, it seems like you have to wait longer and longer and longer, which is a good thing. It says a lot of people are using it with great effect. Investors are also paying close attention to some key partnerships that NVIDIA announced.

Wong said General Motors has selected his company to build its self-driving car fleet, and that led to a decline in the shares of autonomous driving company Mobileye. NVIDIA also announced AI collaborations with IBM, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, and T-Mobile and Cisco will also partner with Disney and Google on humanoid robot development. What is Disney doing in the humanoid robot? Who the hell knows? That's what I couldn't figure out.

The lead story in the journal, the world will need 100 times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary as recently as one year ago. And then I was hearing yesterday that for just one of the big power centers or for one of the big compute centers that's being developed, they're going to need 400 times.

million of these NVIDIA chips, which is where the demand comes from these things. If you continue to watch this. By the way, Vera Rubin proposed that for every visible star in the observable universe, there were nine other invisible masses. Masses of stars, yeah. So the power, the factor of ten for everything that's out there. I think there's a... It takes so long for light to get here because of how long ago the Big Bang was.

But for a billion stars that we sort of can see, there's a billion other galaxies or something. There's just... It's important here's a who. Yes.

General Mills shares following the packaged food company reported earnings of a dollar a share estimates were 96 cents revenue is four point eight four billion dollars slightly below the four point nine six it was Analysts were looking for and the company cut its annual sales forecast citing the impact of macro uncertainty on consumers in the current quarter It said its new guidance does not include the impact of any new tariff actions so uncertainty

causing delayed purchases of breakfast cereals. Does that make sense? No. I would wonder if there are fewer people buying breakfast cereals because they're looking for less carb solutions, more protein. Right. That's a lot of the new diets that push you towards protein. Do you know the small boxes of Froot Loops? How small? The teeny tiny ones? No.

Just not the bigger one. Oh, not the family size, but the regular? $7. Wow. Doesn't that seem crazy? What a great business. They make just vats of those things. And just to put like a couple of cupfuls in a cardboard box all for $7. Yeah. How come the margins are only 1%? Maybe there's... Partials? Yeah. Yeah.

President Trump shaking up the Federal Trade Commission with a controversial pair of firings. Eamon Javers joins us right now with more on this, and this is really kicking up a bit of a storm. Eamon. Yeah, absolutely, Becky. President Trump attempted to fire the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission late Tuesday, setting up a likely Supreme Court battle over whether he has the authority to do that at an independent federal agency.

Any ruling by the conservative Supreme Court here could have sweeping implications for Trump's authority over a host of other agencies, including potentially the FCC and the SEC. The showdown went public Tuesday afternoon when commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter released separate statements saying they'd been fired from the Consumer Protection Agency. Slaughter's statement said, in part, the administration clearly fears the accountability that

opposition voices would provide if the president orders Chairman Ferguson to treat the most powerful corporations and their executives like those that flanked the president at his inauguration with kid gloves. In his statement, Bedoya called Trump's action corruption, plain and simple, and said, I'll see the president in court.

But the new Republican chair of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, released a statement of his own saying, "I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove commissioners, which is necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government." Now, a Supreme Court ruling back in 1935 upheld a law that allows FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause

such as neglecting their duties. But now the question is whether this court will overturn that precedent and grant the president's sweeping new authorities. There's also the question of what Trump intends to do with this newfound power at the FTC if he gets it, guys. Back over to you. Eamon, this is a pretty clear test.

It sounds like the Trump administration wants this to be taken up by the Supreme Court because, again, that ruling is fairly clear from 90 years ago that you can't do just this. It will be settled, I would guess, by the Supreme Court in this. And if it turns out that he gets overruled on it, I think it's going to raise a lot of questions about things he's already done to this point.

Yeah. And, you know, courts are starting to push back on some of the things he's already done in court, reinstated a labor agency person that the president had fired earlier this year. So we'll see where this lands. But I think you're right. This is an administration that clearly is intending to test the absolute outer limits of presidential authority. They want to amass as much power as quickly as they can in these early days here. They clearly have a playbook for doing that.

And this playbook includes going up to the Supreme Court with this precedent to see if they can get it overturned with this much more favorable court. You know, this isn't the New Deal era anymore, right? So the question is then, what does the president want to do with this authority if he's able to get it, right? If he's able to control all of these independent agencies, remove all the Democrats from all these bipartisan commissions, what does that world look like? And then narrow it back down to the FTC, what's he trying to do there?

We saw this debate, and you guys and I were talking about this just yesterday on your program. What does the president want to do here? Does he want to be a conservative populist who's skeptical of broad corporate authority? Or does he want to sweep in an era of massive corporate consolidation through the FTC in sort of a hands-off laissez-faire way? We don't know the answer to that right now.

Andrew Ferguson, as you mentioned, the FTC commissioner chairman now defending what he was saying. But very recently on a Bloomberg podcast, Ferguson was saying that when he was in the minority, he thought it was very useful. He wrote over 400 dissenting opinions challenging the rest of it. And he thought that bipartisanship was kind of the answer and that it was valuable to have these dissenting opinions that were put through, even if you couldn't control how the vote went.

Yeah. And when we talked to him last week, he said that he acknowledges that the president of the United States is his boss and he's not entirely independent. So, you know, take that for what it's worth as well.

Amen. Thank you. I have an assignment for viewers in this area. Here's the New York Post. The astronauts are there. I can't find it in the Daily Snooze. I can't find it anywhere. Now, it's on the cover of most of the other papers, but the name Elon Musk is not mentioned anywhere. It's all become political. It is in the journal. I don't know. It may be in

In the other one. I know. Yeah. You got to go to A3. The New York Times has a picture. You got to go to A21. Mark Twain, famous line. If you read the news, if you don't read the newspapers, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed. Yes, I know that one well. Yeah, we live it. I know. Tease will be next.

Coming up on Squawk Pod, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, an extended discussion on the Fed, inflation, and what consumers are buying. A lot on services, a lot on entertainment, but the spending levels continue to go up. Plus, Moynihan rebuts accusations that his big bank has given conservatives the boot. It's clearly not true because we have 70 million customers and we bank all different types, 100,000 plus religious organizations, etc., etc., etc. We bank oil and gas companies.

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Bank of America is the nation's second largest bank. It serves one out of every two households in the United States, and that gives it pretty unique insight into the state of the consumer. Joining us right now in a CNBC exclusive interview is Brian Moynihan. He is the Bank of America's CEO. And Brian, thank you for being with us this morning. It's great to be here, Becky. Good to see you again.

All right, let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing. We've been talking for a while about what's happening with the market. Part of the concern maybe is changing policy coming out of the White House. But there have been real concerns about what's happening with the consumer, consumer confidence, some of the retailers and the airlines talking about how they're seeing some weakness, at least for the month of February, they were with the consumer. We wanted to hear from you because you have such a good feel for the pulse of the consumer, what you see happening out there.

So, Becky, I had them go and pull the information just as the most recent date they could get. So they got it through Monday. And if you look year to date, our Bank of America consumers are putting 6% more money into the economy than they did for the first two and a half months of last year. And that's a pickup from the fourth quarter last year, which ran 4%, 4.5%.

So that money is going to different places. And you've referenced some clients who might be seeing different things. But a lot on services, a lot in entertainment. But the spending levels continue to go up. And so we're in this classic moment, which we've been in various times, as you and I have talked over the last few years, where the

The consumer is saying, "I'm getting more pessimistic in some of the surveys and things like that." But if you actually look at what they're doing day to day, they continue to spend, which means the economy ought to be holding up better than people think. We'll see this play out. But right now, the consumer is spending at a faster rate now than they did in the fourth quarter and a faster rate than they did last year. That money is going out in the economy every day. For a year, that amount of money going out of our accounts is $4.5 trillion. It's not a small sample set. It's going into all different places.

Is your point then that the ones we've heard it from, the retailers, the airlines, I mean, they're just spending it on different things?

Yeah, they're shifting to services, entertainment, eating out has been relatively stable. They may not be buying as many airline tickets. You look at the debit and credit card data, you can see that. But at the end of the day, what I'm talking about is, this quarter, $1.5 trillion will go out of our consumers' accounts and economy. 6% more will go out this quarter than last year, round numbers. That means it's solid. I think that sets up what Candace Brown and Platner team see in the research, is they don't see a recession.

But they continue to consider the tariff impact on GDP, and they'll keep reflecting that. But they don't see recession. They see inflation being sticky, and the Fed's going to hold rates, and we can talk about that. But that consumer-led economy that the U.S. is, that spending level, and this is what is going on, not what people project will go on. And there's great debate about that because a lot of people say this could happen or should happen or might happen. This is what they're doing so far this year.

I guess the question becomes, is it a self-fulfilling prophecy once you start to see consumer weakness, just in terms of consumer sentiment?

If you think of COVID and think of after COVID and think of different policies and different things going on, the stopping of the stimulus payments, you've seen the consumer confidence up and down. I think the consumer is rightfully saying, wait, these things may cause me to have to pay more, so let me think about that. Rates are up and it affects car prices.

loan pricing, it affects mortgage pricing, and that has an impact. But on the other hand, consumers have tremendous wealth built up in their homes, as your team has been reporting. It's the highest it's ever been and growing. And the stock market has corrected, as you just referenced.

But the reality is, we're out where we are in September, and the consumer confidence in September was pretty strong. This will sort out, and I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of changes going on with the new administration, and trying to sort that out, both for the consumers and companies and small businesses.

Let's talk very quickly about the Fed, that meeting coming later today. You just said that inflation has been very sticky. I think the market's trying to suss out whether the Fed would step in if we did see a dip in the economy or whether they'd be more likely to worry about inflation as we see it right now, not being completely back to their 2% target.

and any potential inflation that could come from tariffs where where do you think the fed is is going to be putting more of its of its focus what the size of the let's go back to it

broad outlines. The Fed's going to reflect what they see in the stats and the data. They've been clear about that. If you look at what our team sees and what they project, they project the U.S. economy to slow down this year from a high 2% growth rate to closer to 2%. And the tariffs, they think, are about a 40 basis point hit to growth, especially in the first

part of the year as people adjust to them. And so, right now, they have 2.5% for the first two quarters of this year. My guess is, as those tariffs become more real, as we move to the April 2nd date, etc., they'll bring that down a bit and probably closer to 2% for the year. And they have 2% GDP growth for '26.

That's trend growth. That's what we've all been trying to get to for 10 or 15 years after the financial crisis. We never saw that kind of GDP growth rate except in corrective periods, and we never saw inflation. On the other hand, inflation is stickier largely because

tariffs add to inflation. They believe that, but they think it's handleable and offset by deregulation and other things that businesses will like. And that will help profit margins be maintained and maybe not pass through every customer. But once you get through the other period, it'll just out. But they're saying that adds to inflation. So that means the Fed's probably on hold for the rest of their forecast period, which is the rest of this year and the next year. Hey, Brian, I want to allay your fears. I'm going to talk about debanking, but not with you, because I can prove

You never debanked me. So I can prove that you didn't have something against my kind. I don't know what... You did close my most convenient branch, but I'm not going to... I won't talk to you about that. But, you know, it might be an issue. And Tim Scott, the senator...

does think it could be an issue. Now, President Trump is suing Capital One, saying that they closed a bunch of accounts down after January 6th without any reason for the Trump organization. And it's been done in the past. It was actually, remember Obama with Operation Chokepoint? And then Travis Hill, the FDIC chair, acting chair,

Release correspondence showing that Biden regulators sent letters, not don't lend a crypto. Actually, explicit letters do not lend to the crypto industry. So it's been done and abused. But I don't think it's the banks. I think it's regulators for whoever, you know, has a certain ax to grind at the time.

Do you oppose having some type of legislation that would prevent regulators from doing these arbitrary and capricious things to banks and ordering them around?

Joe, you've laid out all the discussions in my discussions with Chair Scott and others. There is an issue that we are being told we have to do X, and then people say, well, that's not right. And you're saying, but we are in the middle, and it's an inch-wide, mile-deep hole. The penalties, the fines, the amount of work we have to do for these orders, because they're based on things like reputational risk, and it's a zero-fault tolerance viewpoint, which is you could do millions and millions of reviews, and if they've

The irregulars found one, they would exact severe penalties. So I think the goal is to get the regulation fixed. And it's clearly not true, because we have 70 million customers and we bank all different types, 100,000 plus religious organizations, etc., etc., etc. We bank oil and gas companies, and all the stuff that people say you don't or do. The reality is that the regulations, because they have things like reputational risk, which is viewed after the fact in retrospect, are very difficult for institutions to

So our industry has made it clear with the Senate Banking Committee and the House Banking Committee and the administration, if you change these rules, you will not have this vice you put the industry in. And by the way, then it's interpreted by different administrations differently. And on the crypto, I think Acting Chair Hill had it right. We were given letters that said, this is an activity we're not sure is legal, stay out of it. And we did.

And if they make it legal, we'll get back in. As I said, we'll be back in the stablecoin business probably and other things like that. And so will the whole industry.

Brian, let's talk a little bit about animal spirits because that was basically on every guest's lips starting in January, maybe even earlier than that, on the idea that the Trump administration and its pro-business policies would unleash these animal spirits. It does seem like that has slowed down a little bit. Maybe that is because of concern about what's happening with the tariffs in other places. But what do you see from all the business leaders you talk to?

Look, at the end of the day, the business community is very enthused about deregulation and getting regulation right. Whether it's the drug industry, whether it's the bank industry, whether it's all different industries, they know that they have to have fair regulation, which is based in congressional intent and people's intent.

but not subject to reinterpretation by other people. And that's been a difficult thing. We've been swinging back and forth for years on regulation. So they're enthused with the idea of lowering the regulation. I think that would be good for America and also be competitive for America. And they're enthused about that. What they're trying to figure out now, and it creates a lot of debate, is that

The offset to that is understanding how these tariffs will affect the trading patterns of the world, the delivery patterns of the world, the manufacturing patterns of the world, and getting that right. At the end of the day, this country is a big final market, as is Europe, where lots of goods are sold, as is Canada and Mexico are part of the supply chain and part of the final markets, and as is China. Everybody's trying to figure that out.

That's causing people to say, "Wait a second, let me look at this." Now, the reality is that if you look at the underlying consumer activity we talked about, if you look at commercial activity, their draw rates on lines of credit indicate that they're still -- because a draw for small, medium-sized business on line of credit has a higher interest rate than it did before the rates

came up, they're looking at it saying, "I've got to really be sure that what I do happens." You're seeing a little more draws now. That may be getting ahead of the tariffs. But the reality is, the business is still a coiled spring ready to go when more certainty comes in. I think all businesses try to plan one, three, five years out. If you're not sure how long this is going to work, that's going to take time.

But the administration has been clear that they've got to get through a rearrangement of the economy that they're after and they're trying to achieve. And I think as this plays out, you'll see businesses come back. You saw a big deal that you referenced earlier in the last couple of days. You'll see transactions take place, a lot of conversations. But that's just going to take a little bit of settling down for people to take off. So, Brian, net-net, you got what could be

some deregulation in your industry that could be very good, obviously, for you. You've got Doge perhaps starting to make a dent in just the waste and fraud and overspending from a bloated organization. You've got tax rates most likely for corporations staying at 21% when that's extended. And then you've got the tariffs.

Are you OK with both the good and the bad, net-net? Are you OK with that calculus of policies? I think we have a great company, and we do have been through all different types of administrations, including the first one, George Washington's. And so we'll adjust and make the thing work. I think it just takes time to settle into a new set of patterns. And I think that, look,

The deregulation thing is real for our industry. We had a behind-the-scenes constant ratcheting up of our capital requirements, of our liquidity requirements. Over the last couple of years, our common equity was up 25%. Our risk really didn't change. Our capital ratios reported only went up half of that. You're saying that doesn't make sense.

to do efforts in the Fed and others, and are going to try to put that back in the middle. And I think that's all good. And if it's good for banking, it'll be good for our clients, because we'll be able to lend more money. 100 basis points of capital is a couple hundred billion dollars of lending we could do. And what seems like a little bit

is actually a lot. And that's what we're trying to get through to people. And I think if you look at other industries, they're trying to figure it out. But at the end of the day, the regulatory aspects got past the point where people could function. And now they just got to figure out the tariff aspects, which are tricky depending on the industry and are more impactful on some. And they'll see it play out. But I think all of us will get to the other side and figure it out as long as it becomes clear relatively soon.

Brian, we're running a headline right under you that says, according to you, inflation is stickier largely because of the tariffs. Is that a fair assessment of what you said, or was it slightly more nuanced than that? No, it's sticky before the tariffs. The tariffs didn't add a nominal amount to it. They're not caught. The stickiness of inflation has been true, and that's why we, four months ago, two months ago, took off any Fed cuts recently.

for '25 and '26, before everybody else did, Candace and her team, on the theory that this inflation was going to take longer to squeeze out. If you go ask the historians, in effect, they say it takes three or four years. I think people are premature how fast it'll come out. You've seen the market whipsaw on that, no cuts, seven cuts, four cuts, three cuts, no cuts, three cuts. It's banging around. But the rowdy is, you've already seen rates come down, and the Fed will have to be careful to make sure they glide the path down. So, the stickiness had to do more with

before inflation. Inflation adds another 10, 20, 30 basis points, our team says, to the inflation rate, which then makes it a little higher nominally. But the reality is over time that works through because the base becomes higher, as you well know. Yeah, I would think, though, that the Fed would be a little cautious about cutting, not knowing what the impact of tariffs is going to be. And Jay Powell has said that they can't make policy based on things that haven't happened yet. But

it would seem that maybe they'd want to hold on to the firepower that they've built up over the last year or so. Look, in the long term, it would be a better situation if the United States had a real interest, nominal interest rate and a real interest rate that started with a more normal front end 3%, say, on a Fed funds rate and a 4.5% 10-year rate. That is more what we

we have had over time. We had a very odd period from the financial crisis, really interrupted a bit by the pandemic. But long-term growth, we barely got rates up in 2019, and they were cutting rates again because inflation and growth was not sufficient.

I think the trick now is not to overcorrect. When you talk to central bankers around the world who lived through that long period of time, they're saying, "Wait a second, if we choke off inflation now and choke off growth, isn't that what we tried for 10 or 15 years to get to that we couldn't get to?"

The tough part for the Fed is, how do they bring this down, but not bring it down so fast they put us back in a trough of low inflation, low growth? I think the good news is, with the consumer spending we see, that's consistent with a growing economy. They've got a real edge of straight across the curve now, in terms of that. They've taken a lot of monetary accommodation and shrunk their balance sheet.

And so as the tariffs and other things, new policies go through, they can react to that. But they shouldn't be premature to try to goose the economy when it's growing at 2%. It's kind of interesting. People might predict one lower than two this quarter, but they're out in this first quarter sometimes lower. But if you think about it, people are predicting 2% growth. We were dying to get there for a long period of time, and we couldn't get there.

You know, the New York Post had a story a few days ago, a bunch of anonymous sources that they cited in this, but they were basically saying that Jamie Dimon and David Solomon have made a lot of moves to move closer to the Trump administration as opposed to you. I just wonder, have you had talks with the Trump administration, anyone in the administration about changing regulations that are here or the bank's relationship with the Trump administration?

Yeah, we work with every administration. We've worked with this administration and made our, you know, both at the industry level and our company level, making our points about how we do. We always try to educate from our standpoint, our industry standpoint, what could be done to improve the economy of America and the strength of America. And we firmly believe as a company and as an industry that that degradation occurs. And we're making those points, whether it's to the congressional delegations or to the

the Treasury Secretary or to the others, they're saying you've got to make this, you know, you can, you have a chance to make this swing back and get in a place where America can continue to make progress and grow. I mean, think about the length of the economic recovery. The recession was so short around the pandemic. It's been this long recovery. If we can keep this going, that's good for the United States. It's also good for the world, quite frankly.

Yeah. Brian, I want to thank you for your time today. I guess the big takeaway, though, is that you think the economy is doing better than the market may be worried about at this point, just based on the numbers that you see. We see the consumer continue to be solid, and that should bode well for the economy. And yet there's a lot of question out there, but I think that'll sort through. But right now, we're not talking about what could happen. We're talking about what is happening as the consumer continues to spend pretty strongly for the first part of this year.

Okay. Brian, thank you very much for your time today. It's great talking to you. We'll be right back. The best cars for the money are Hondas. Save big with 0% financing.

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You're listening to Squawk Pod. Hop on, Becky. Thank you. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams are finally back on Earth after their week-long stay in space turned into a nine-month grind. Their SpaceX Dragon capsule splashing down off the coast of Florida yesterday around 6 p.m. Eastern time. There it goes.

A pod of dolphins could be seen swimming near the craft as it bobbed in the water and the astronauts waited for help from a fleet of recovery boats. Williams and Wilmore blasted off from Earth in Boeing's Starliner capsule last June on what was expected to be a week-long mission. The problems with the spacecraft turned into a nine-month delay, casting doubts on Boeing's space program overall.

Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, was eventually recruited to help bring the astronauts home. Now that they are back on Earth, NASA doctors will be watching Williams and Wilmore's cardiac health, their blood pressure, their vision, neurological functions, I think bone density, and what's happened with some of those things along the way. Is he because of your inner ear didn't have gravity for so long? I would not be able to. That's why they're carrying them out. One of the astronauts was talking about his...

Every time he stood up, after he got back, blood would all flow down to his legs. Yeah. Because your whole cardio system was thrown off. I wonder what would really, if it would ever be irreversible. Like three years? What if you're up there for three years? What does that look like? What's the longest? It's been over a year. It's definitely been over a year. But I don't think they've done two years. No. It's just because we evolved with all this gravity. Yeah. So we're not really...

Things that I don't know what you end up looking like you look end up looking like that that is the that picks up. Those fat people in the chairs just wall wall.

And that is the pod for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern to get the smartest takes and analysis from our TV show right into your ears. Please follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

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