Energy came out with its inventory report supporting what we heard from the api last night. If not even a little bit more drastic. A draw down in cruel Oil Inventories 14. 5 million barrels. The api number of 12. 1 was the highest draw down in more than 30 years. This is very significant. Theres some speculation in the marketplace that hermine caused supply reductions and this could be a one off this week but theres another side to this story that could be that were starting to work through some of the inventoriful some of that that everybody has been worried about so a clear reason to see the prices move higher. Closer to 47 barrel. Back to you. Thank you. Good thursday morning. Kayla already made her way back but well start with politics this morning. Hillary Clinton Holding a News Conference after both candidates spoke on nbc. John is live with the latest. Hey, carl. We had both candidates last night at the nbc msnbc commander in chief forum to talk about issues. Hillary clinton had the misfortune of going first and she was pressed repeatedly on issues about her email and then donald trump got to go and he really cut loose with a bunch of remarkable statements including statements criticizing american generals under president obama and also praising vladimir putin. The leader in an authoritarian country for having a high approval rating. The man has very strong control over a country. Now its a very different system and i dont happen to like the system but certainly in that system he has been a leader far more than our president has been a leader. I think under the leadership of Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where its embarrassing for our country. Now Hillary Clinton decided to have a reset this morning. She had a News Conference and criticized the statement from donald trump. She said her campaign had not been treated equally by the media. She also went after Donald Trumps statement that the United States in the iraq war should have seized the oil of iraq. The United States of america does not invade other countries to plunder and pillage. We dont send our brave men and women around the world to steal oil. Every Republican Holding or seeking office in this country should be asked if they agree with donald trump about these statements. Now of course all of this is a warm up for the debates that will include Hillary Clinton, donald trump and just maybe gary johnson which began in just a couple of weeks although we dont know if johnson is going to make that debate stage and as you know he had a little stumble this morning. Speaking of which, lets take a quick listen to that moment on morning joe and get your reaction afterwards. Heres gary johnson. What would you do if you were elected about apello. And what is aleppo. Youre kidding . No. He tried to answer for that answer. John, what do you think . Damaging. It was a mortifying moment. The kind of moment every candidate dreads. It was a situation where he was drum struck by the question. Didnt get the frame of reference. His aids say he is going to issue a statement later in the day. But on the other hand a lot more people because of that stumble are hearing the name fwrks ary johnson today and if he can get to 15 hell be on that debate stage and some people may look at this controversy and say oh i dont know what aleppo is either and maybe its not such a big deal. Well have to he see how that plays out. Our thanks to you and were joined by steve mccann and trump supporter and chief strategist. Good morning to you. Three or four days in a row now clinton is taking questions from reporters. Is this a response to that disappearing convention bounce . I dont think. I think its always been the plan to run a more transparent operation. And youll see it every day. Do you believe hes getting different treelt from journalists, moderators and the press in general that jump is . Shes getting different treatment. Trump gets a pass on his tax returns and the fact that a lot of people say he didnt pay any taxes. So use a donald trump reference. She certainly has gotten a lot of questions about her emails and about the Clinton Foundation where as donald trump hasnt gotten nearly as many questions about his ties to chinese banks and the russian government. And all the ridiculous and inane things he has said. Donald trump has largely side stepped calls for him to release his taxes being able to move on to different topics and sweep the controversy of the day under the rug but the krcriticism was that the questioning of donald trump was benign. Do you agree that the questioning could have been tougher and that he is able to side step some of the serious issu issues. I think donald trump did pretty well last night where as Hillary Clinton had to try to reset this morning with a grueling 7 minute News Conference taking all of four questions. I dont think josh earnest is sweating his job security over that one. And at least according to the national polls, do you think that the aleppo slip up benefits one candidate more than the other. He would have to show a little bit more on foreign policy. He is just not particularly learned or informed by foreign policy. Its been all over the place. I think this helps trump and i think trump is really locking down that wing of the Republican Party and the vast majority of americans sick and tired of the foreign wars and getting invo e involved in the business. Donald trump is probably thanking god this morning that he didnt get the aleppo question. I actually think it was unfortunate for gary johnson because its going to end upkeeping him out of the debate. There was a conversation about whether or not he should be in the debates and he answered that himself and as for Donald Trumps performance last night he embarrassed himself as well. Probably something made up like so many other things donald trump does routinely. But i think, you know as you look at these candidates and you ask these questions and you think about the serious consequences and the serious issues that the next president is going to have to face around the world, you have to look at gary johnson and say okay well he has disqualified himself and look at donald trump and say really, donald, really . And ask yourself are we going to do this . Are we going to think about doing this . I dont need to tell you it suggests that perhaps Hillary Clinton was wearing an ear piece in the forum last night. Does the Trump Campaign believe that . I dont know but i dont buy into the conspiracy theories and i dont think its relevant. At the end of the day, all she can try to sell is donald trump is bad. Shes part of the old failed regime that americans are are sick and tired of and donald trump is selling new ideas and going to try to move us forward and try to get our country back on track. Tonld trump is selling a positive division. All hilary can do is try to attack donald trump and thats why he is looking strong in november. By the way im wearing an ear piece myself and so is everybody on this show right now. Its about hearing what is going on with a remote location or questioner in the audience. Not a big deal. Dont give it away. It is now official regarding ryan lochte. He will be suspended for ten months. Three of his teammates also receiving disciplinary measures after that incident in rio where he claimed to have been involved in a situation at a gas station. Well talk to the ceo of at t mobility but twitter with a poord me Board Meeting in San Francisco. And sony is out with a big announcement of its own. The ceo of Sony Computer Entertainment will talk about the new playstation and competition with microsoft when squawk alley continues. To buy that truc more apple reaction this morni morning. It came down to one thing. It really comes down to one word. Courage. The courage to move on, do something new that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous coura courage. The tech press believes apples design advantage is eroding and others say they are capable. And every ill provement after that was always going to be smaller and every technology follows an s curve. Smartphones are toward the top of the s curve. The ill provement you can see is going to be getting smaller so am takes the head phone jack out its 100 Year Old Technology they get more space for battery. Probably the right thick to do. They killed cds, they killed floppy disks and other ports. Theyll kill the head phone jack. It was going to go away eventually. Apple was the company to do it. That said its not the most interesting thing about the device but its the one to get the most upset about. Whats the interesting thing . The new cal rangers system is interesting because it points to really the smartphone seal ing the deal. Cameras have gone from being fun to camera sales collapsing to now you have zoom, youre starting to have depth of field and certainly to capture 3d objects and to that point where the next phase is going to go and thats toward vr. I look back at the number of updates for the iphone and the iphone 4 along with a new design had the first retina display. Face time and the chip that am was making itself was a big deal. Will you tell lte along with a bigger screen. The 6 had a bigger screen and apple pay. The 7 is exactly the same size and had so nice stuff in it but in terms of wholesale Technology Shifts it seems to be a very different cadence. Wouldnt you agree . Yes and no. When you look at each of the reheses its three things going on. This year its a camera. Last year i dont even remember. Last year that was the feature. Camera is a big deal this year but within that this saiddy ptee of improvements so you get to the point now that they get 3. 3 billi 3. 3 billion transsitors so you have something thats very crude terms 1,000 times more Computing Power than you had back when microsoft conquered the world with windows 95. So you have this improvement going on every single year. They call out a few things burt everybody gets it at the end of the day. But a lot of the features that were announced yesterday on the iphone 7. Water resistance. The dual camera and the addition of this new home button, you could already get those on lg phones on htc phones, on samsung phones so how high are the expectations for apple next year when largely what is expected is a generational update. What theyre good at is making them work better. So if you look at the reviews its like good but but its not there yet. Apple has the advantage were in the scurve and its flattening out. Youre not going to go from no retina to retina. Those fundamental Building Blocks arent there to be built yet until we go 2 or 3 or 4 years out in the future when we start having vr and augmented reality a bit further out. Another big story this morning is hp enterprise. Revenue misses estimates. Company saw weakness in servers however their upbeat guidance and beat on profit made some news. My view is the next five years will belong to the nimble the fast and the focused so the contrast could not be more stark. Theyre getting bigger and were getting smaller. Theyre leveraging up 60 or 70 billion of debt on the Balance Sheet and we have 5. 5 billion of net cash on the Balance Sheet. Were leaning into new technology. Theyre doubling down on Old Technology and a cost take out play. More of a private equity play, really. Her play book continues to be well be nimbler than others by being smaller than others, make sense . Probably. She eluded. Theres a whole story around how they moved to the cloud and Artificial Intelligence. The whole structure is changing from the companies they had in place five years ago. If she is right it seems like everybody else is wrong. We seem to be moving into this area of cloud consolidation. Companies that have gotten technology right are getting bigger. Meg has been selling off these pieces of hp now making this argument. Ill not sure about. Do you think she is right . Should they be getting smaller . And how you find networking and Artificial Intelligence and learning and then cloud. You have dell doing this really interesting piece of capital structuring around enc and come at it from another angle and you have companies more trying to look at how do we position ourselves as it starts to go away. But when this spin off took place she said that hpe was going to be part of the spin off so all expectations were that hpe would get bigger and the rest of the business was the legacy business that would just sort of throw off cash. So is this going directly against what her strategy was for this company . I dont follow it closely enough to have a view on that. Theyre spinning off assets because they never managed to build Core Software assets. That was the whole effort all along. Thats what ibm says every quarter when their revenue goes down because they have been selling off their empty calor s calories. What do you find interesting going into 2017 . A fundamental transition from mobile being the trend for new things close to cloud and enterprise. So yes its going to be big but we know whats going on there and working out fundamentally new questions that computers can even answer is the new thing that obviously google is building everything around. Up next, at ts take on the big iphone announcement. The ceo is going to join us live when we come right back. At t with a large presence in the desert at this years conference. Announcing a promotion for a free iphone 7 beginning tomorrow. If you switch from another carrier. Following that apple event joining us now from las vegas is the ceo of at t mobility. Glenn its great to have you today. I imagine you have to put in your orders for the new iphone sometimes in advance of events like yesterdays but how do you look at a device and gauge the demand for your customer for how interested theyll be . I think first of all the announcements yesterday by apple were very exciting and, you know, i think theres a lot of discussions and i was listening to you guys this morning around the device and what they announced and i think as usual it and we as a company are very excited about it. And we expect it to be very successful. A large part of the Customer Base coming from the former owners of the 5c and the 5s and theyll be upgrading to the 7. Where they are so fragmented we did what our customers asked us to do and moved to our next program which allows customers to get devices for zero down and pay for that device overtile and were doing what our customers asked us to do so we will look at demand. We will see very quickly the feedback from our customers as soon as we open it up. We can also see other things like customers checking on upgrade eligibility and looking at things so well have a good idea but one of the things that at t has an advantage and we have done this longer than anybody else. We have a lot of history with apple and a lot of looking back over years and different launches they have done whether i heard the person before we talking about when you pring out a larger screen youre going to get a different type of demand and people will be excited and i think people are waiting to see what came out yesterday and the feedback so far, what were hearing its very quick and very, very positive. What is thriving upgrades these days . Its not what we saw between 3g and 3. 5 g to lte. So what is causing the customer to want to upgrade now that we have the functions that are basic to smartphones like face time and video conferences and being able to shoot video . All of that stuff that pushed people in the past . I think its a good question and i think its really in the eyes of the customer, right . We have massive base of customers. They upgrade for different reasons. And that was a part of it. And the one thing weve seen them do more and more through video and theyre obviously thinking in video about the quality of the screen. Theyre thinking about the speed of the process inside and looking at all the aspects because of what they want and again with video being a big part of our growth and you guys noel that were big in the video business whether acquisition of directtv and the announcements that we made. This is a part of the Decision Making process for customers. Is it possible across multiple sectors of the business . And when you put together what we believe is the future, right . The future is ability mobility and having your content any time, any place on any device you want it and the key here with our directv acquisition that this is about folks getting what they want and our customers are asking. They want their content anymore, anywhere on any device and when you put those two things together youre talking about a Pretty Amazing customer, right . A mobility customer and now a tv customer in their home with us. And now youre getting your tv any time you want it and dvr going with you and theres a lot here that customers are telling us they love and as you know with that unlimited offer we announced we had over 5 Million People take that last quarter. We appreciate your time this morning. Thanks for joining us. Markets closing a couple of memos ago. Lets get to seema in hq. Not as dovish as markets would have liked and thats why stocks initially move lower but ill just point out that italy and spain carry losses at the moment. European general Bank Governor announcing there will be no changes to rates. No change to its current Bond Buying Program or the duration of quantitative easing emphasizing that the pace of Structural Reforms needed to be picked up. And some of what a disappointing announcement. Reversing course as he spoke to reporters in that press meeting. The currency also gaining ground against the u. S. Dollar hitting 113. Its highest level since august 26th were seeing a bit of selling sending yields higher. Theres a still notion that he will extend from march to december of 2017. Basically highlighting that investors are still expecting stronger Monetary Policy from the European Central bank you have microsystems and the semiconductor down 3 to 5 . Back to you. Thank you, seemaful coming up, sony unveiling its next swren ration of playstations or at least its next iteration on this generation as competition with microsoft heats up ahead of the holiday season. Well break it all down next on squawk alley. Like coffee. But theres one thing you do. You guys okay . its called predix from ge. The cloudbased Development Platform thats industrialstrength strength whats that . The number of units well make next month to maximize earnings. Thats a projection. No, its a fact. Based on hundreds of proprietary and open data sets folded into a realtime, actionable analytics model. Nine. Eight. Three. Five. Two. Youre not gonna round that up . You dont round up facts. Powerful analytics driving decisions for thworlds most valuable bras. Hewlett packard enterpse. Good morning, everyone. Here is your cnbc news update at this hour. President obama wrapping up his week long asia tour. Boarding air force one after attending the 11th east asia summit. Before his visit he attended the g2 summit in china. A tough interview for libertarian president ial candidate gary johnson on morning joe today. Take a listen to his response when asked about his syria policy. What would you do if you were elected about aleppo. About . Aleppo. And what is aleppo . Youre kidding. No. The u. S. Olympic committee and usa swimming jointly announcing disciplinary measures for ryan lochte and his teammates for their involvement in fabricating the rio robbery scandal. He has been suspended for ten months including the 2017 national championships. The three other for four months. Thats the news update this hour. Back to squawk alley. Carl back to you. Sue, thank you very much. Apple ceo tim cook unveiling a few features but is it enough to turn it to growth. Josh has that story. Hey, josh. Well, Carl Tim Cook did a good job selling me on that iphone 7. I will be upgrading. Thats because its 40 faster than my 6s. The display is about 25 brighter. Better camera and according to the company i should get about 2 hours more per day out of that battery but how many people agree . Thats the question as the iphone franchise does remain under pressure. Sales of apples most popular product have fallen for two straight quarters as the tech giant struggles with tough comps. Bears say apple is due for more pain ahead. The changes are incremental he says and apple will lose market share over the upcoming year. Now investors do seem to share that concern. Apple stock up some 10 over the past three months but it has gone nowhere over the past year and one potential risk could be that consumers do upgrade their iphones but move to the 6s rather than that higher margin 7 plus but pipers gene money administ munster tells me he doesnt see that as a real threat. The mix of the iphone 7 versus the others will be consistent in the past cycle. So we dont see a risk and the reason is what the iphone 7 is pushing is around the camera and the use of a camcamera. Theyre becoming increasingly important to communicateful thats enough of an attraction to get people to upgrade to the more expensive iphone 7s. So munster does think the iphone 7 helps return this product to growth. He notes theres 275 million active iphones out there older than the 6. Were going to soon have a better idea whether that was the right call fans start receiving their new iphones starting september 16th. Guys back to you. Thank you, josh. Meantime sony is bringing two new consoles to the table for gamers. Theyll hit shelves september 15th. They also announced new wireless controllers, cal rangers and wireless head set. Andrew is the ceo of Sony Interactive entertainment and joins us here at post 9. Welcome. Good morning. How important is it to have a ps 4 prothat looks like its not a gaming system. Maybe vr is going to appeal to people that arent your traditional gamer. What were trying to do with the announcements yesterday is theres a slimmer lower cost more performance efficient item is something theyre very accustomed to and its part of the natural game plan. Its never happened before in the history of consoles. We tend to be on a very confirmed life cycle and its a stable Platform Developers can work on overtime. On this occasion though, your last item, we looked to the mobile industry and consumers seem to be interested and atuned to a different innovation cadence i dont think we want to take them to that kind of a pitch but we thought there was an opportunity midway through the cycle. Some of our partners have been asking for this and were seeing interesting things happening both with vr and also with display technologies and this is a natural and theres an opportunity not to split the market or to do anything to damage a really nice integrated community of players but to offer something that keeps people engaged for the longterm. Controversial decision not to allow 4k bluray play back in this device. I dont know if anyone gets an opportunity to take over the living room when you have families, certainly mine where lots of viblg experiences are going on on different devices. The 4k bluray decision was a matter of responding to what were seeing our consumers doing. The biggest use case we have where people spend their time on ps 4 is games. The second one is actually video and people are spending a huge amount of time but by and large its streaming video. We had a hugely Successful Partnership with amazon and netflix and hulu. You have to make several calls when you develop a new product but were looking very heavily to invest and support 4k streaming services. We have two first mover advantages and thats growing rap rapidly. And people play online with their friends. There tends to be a Network Effect now in games. The second advantage is yes, i think a year. Being here and now as opposed to down the road. We have a very engaged very demanding audience. We want to see something here and something they can tough and feel and enjoy the benefits of now. You talk about the compression of refresh cycles on consoles. Do developers have an idea of how quickly that should happen versus consumers . If you look at developers they have been working with the pc so many are used to the cycle. Some of those folks say why arent you thinking about innovation . On the other hand you have to strike the right balance. We want our fan base to buy into something and know its going to be there for the longterm and allow them they invest a lot of money and time into game libraries and we want to be able to fulfill that promise but what this does is it makes you have games that, you know, look prettier, that are going to be more graphically interesting and we think that people embrace that. Quickly, if you can, is gaming multiplayer gaming as possible at this point as you would like it to be . It seems to me lots of people used to be able to stair at the same screen and play together and today youre on different devices, maybe still playing together at least out of the gate might not aid that. Do we need to get together more gaming instead of being apart . Absolutely. Im a big fan of it. One of the things we did with playstation 4 was we put a button on the controller itself that said share. That was deliberate and strategic. I think it can be a lot more than firstperson shooter games. We enjoy seeing people connect. We look forward to that. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. When we come back this morning, a new loft evaluation for chinese Ride Sharing Company didi. Squawk alley is back in a moment. Coming up on the Halftime Report will todays Board Meeting be a turning point . We have him on with us today live. Its down 9 this year. The average analyst price target shows a 20 jump. What gives . Who is right . Well debate it and the Options Market showing signs chinese stocks could be in for a big swing. Find out which way. Today noon eastern. Halftime report. John, well see you a little more than ten minutes away. All right. Looking forward to that. Meanwhile lets get out to chicago cme group and Rick Santelli with the santellie change. Thanks john. We had an ecb meeting and i dont see huge moves and there really wasnt anything new but do we need anything new to have a very indepth discussion just on policy in general . The new issue lately are corporate securities with regard to the European Central bank they already beat everybody to that punch plus more. Not only is it about corporates but about potentially moving into other things like equities and when it comes to the u. S. Theres been hint abts the former, maybe a little aprehengs about the latter but in the end, what is value. There was a time when value represented something that a set of rules were quantity fly ball. If you wanted to predict value for security and you look at the company. You encourage, you know, whether the rate of return was worth the risk that something bad would happen at the Company Bringing the price of that security down but ultimately the real real des should that occur, would the corporation be so impacted they would go out of business or would you just have to hold it to maturity and obviously Balance Sheet and all the other issues, but these days its not so much about that and that really is the issue that keeps me up at night. So as the Central Banks of europe are not only creating negative interest rates, but theyre also creating corporate securities and the latter may have and has had negative. What is a corporate worth . Unfortunately, its kind of value versus ponzi. Lets be honest, why would anyone hold a negative yielding security and why would anybody buy a corporate when the issue used to be that a corporate securitys you cuniqueness was held the solve rans. Not true anymore. The value of all these securities is what the central bank will do when it buys them. It isnt about value. The problem with that is that policy may be only this deep or is it . So if one day mario gets told by the german high courts he cant do these programs or we find that politics in the u. S. Changes the dynamics of all this, then youre left like an anvil in midair because the true value is not anywhere near the traded value or maybe it will last forever. Maybe thats why the fed cant tighten because they dont want the anvil will fall but we will never mind until we have normalization. Well see how this brand new world turns out. Thank you. Up next, twitter shares falling about 4. 5 as the companys board meets out west this morning. Were live outside twitters headquarters next. If were not ready when the planets are perfectly aligned, thats it. We need really tight teerature controls engineering, aerodynamics a split second too long could mean scrapping it all and starting over. Propulsion, structural anasis Maple Bourbon caramel. Thatwhat were working right now. From design through production, Siemens Technology helps manufacturers meet critical deadlines. I think thisll be our biggest flor yet. When you only have one shot, you need a whole lot of ingenuity. Twitters board of directors meeting today in San Francisco and speculation is rampant about the future of the company and its leadership. We are joined live from twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Reporter yes, leading into todays meeting theres been a lot of talk about the future of twitter as a stand alone company and as we speak shares now trading down about 4 . Heres what we know. Sources tell cnbc that management is exploring ways to save money since revenues are tight. The options include layoffs or selling off assets. A source also tells us that twitter ceo jack dorseys management will not be questioned. There are questions about the a sale of the company but there are no offers on the table. It could include microsoft, amazon. Twitter is focusing on its partnership with the nfl. Theyre helping it will help boost user growth. No comment from twitter. When we come back didi solidifying its position in the world. Fox co in. Is announcing its investigating 120 million in didi. It is one of the most valuable start ups in the world. Asked if didi and fox conner are working together, a spokesperson says there are no plans yet, but managing to push out one of your largest rivals is a good track record. You can bet theyll be working on something together especially with all the driveless cars and the Car Technology thats in play. Didi is looking to work with apple on some things as well. Jim louis was saying that to us from the code conference earlier. Apple has invested in didi. 1 billion, yes. A lot to get to tonight. Well get to chinese inflation data. Well probably talk about that tomorrow. Restoration earnings after the bell. The dregs of the earning season coming in after the bell. Lets get over to headquarters and get the half. Thanks so much. Welcome to the Halftime Report. Our top trade this hour taking on twitter. The analyst who says the stock is a flat out sell. Hes with us live today as the companys board meets to discuss the future. Are rumors of a coming deal enough to buy the stock. First, lets get right to scott. Hes wall streets biggest bear on this name. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. What expectations do you have from this board