It was weird. It was fitting that that happened. It was good. We were hoping for it. We should tell you about the s p 500 as well. It added more than 5 to close at 1,883. The nasdaq closing at 4,114. We decided that good news was good news now and bad news is no longer. We got a 0. 1 gdp number earlier. Right. Economy starts with i did like this, andrew. It was hurt in the First Quarter, hurt by frigid weather. Yes. Frigid weather. You know what thats an indication of, the warming. Youre reading the wall street journal. Just think about the logic in that statement. Thats not what i want to talk about. What i want to talk about, also a day they decided to continue to cut its not like there was bad news that was going to cause them not to taper. There was nothing but there was a little bit of bad news in there. There was bad news. A lot of times market set new highs on bad news. Then i started thinking about it again, kbe qe is very, very powerful. What was the maximum we got to, 85. 85. Its not the money itself, its the psychology of once they say but is it . Isnt it possible, 45 billion, were still doing it month after month after month and the market is responding to all this excess liquidity, i think. Either that or we better do 3 and everybody better be right. Youre suggesting at the end of the year when its all gone that thats bad news . Maybe its coincidence instead of leading. Normally the markets wouldnt work like that. The fed still has the pedal on the gas, big time. 45 billion. Thats big time. They did qe 1, then they did qe 2. The first two were defined. They came out and said were going to go 500 billion. That will be the first one. Were still cranking out basically 50 billion a month. Were still in full qe, you know, heaven, whatever it is. But maybe thats not it. Maybe the 0. 1 is back end loaded. Maybe theres all kinds of stuff built up now. Maybe we get a handle on the third or Fourth Quarter. You would think. When it was all said and done, we hit the gavel and the market closed at a new high. The market cooperated with cnbcs own narrative about having coming into being i just miss it. I get 23 years. I had to stand off you had to stand up with us, please. I apologize. There we are. Kohn was here. Sue was at f n. There you are, joe, on the right. Faber and i, you can see us a little bit. Sue was at f n. She was sue mcmahon. The rest of us came back at the merger with cnbc insana and griffith. Isnt that amazing to see how many people work here. Its like a family. It is. Its like a family thats had a lot of kids. Yes. Its everywhere. Thats what mark, our president talked about. Global enterprise. It used to be sort of global. Now its in nine or ten langs, talking about they think we have two different languages in india. Squawk box is a brand that will be the real celebration, that will be next year. 20 years for squawk box and one variation or another. But only held together by one constant. Right there. You want me to point at you . Im pointing at you. Joe kernen. The producer, thats right. And mack whos not here again. Anyway, a handful of key economic numbers are wedged in between the fed meeting and the jobs friday. Jobless claims is at 8 30 eastern, economists expecting 320,000 unemployment claims filed for the first time last week. Then personal income and spending are also out at 8 30 a. M. Then at 10 00, a fresh read on the nations Economic Activity with the ism Manufacturing Survey for april. At 10 00, we get an update on housing construction. Its all leading up to tomorrow. Youre here. When are you going out. Im going out to omaha after the show tomorrow. After the show . After the show. Ill see w. B. Over the weekend and be back with you on monday morning. You leave here tomorrow. Is it like nixon, you walk on the helicopter, you wave. And then the helicopter takes you to the gulf stream . How does that in this case, since were so close to teterboro, were driving. Youre driving . Someones driving you . No. Im going on a plane from newark to chicago. Why are you stopping in chicago . Refuelling . Theres no direct flights. Tell the pilot to make it direct. Pilots. The pilots. Another big morning for quarterly results, some of the biggest names well hear from before the bell, exxonmobil and conoco phillips, two Big Oil Companies as well as mastercard and drug distributor cardinal health. Also out today, tmobile, viacom, dominos pizza, beazer homes and generac. This came out of nowhere, didnt it . Cinderella story with as many times as people have lost power, quite a little system they have. Someday if you ever are in the burbs. I may have to get generac. Unless you want to go to a hotel for three weeks when the power goes out. The wall street journal is reporting that coke is responding to Warren Buffetts decision to abstain from the shareholder vote, a topic he talked about with becky quick on april 23rd. We abstained because we didnt agree with the plan. We thought it was excessive. And i love coke. I love the management. I love the directors. But so i didnt want to vote no. Kind of unamerican to vote no at a coke meeting. I didnt want to express any disapproval of management but we did disapprove of the plan. Heres where it gets interesting this morning. Weve obtained exclusively a new letter that activist investor David Winters sent to cokes board of directors. Hes ccd is to Warren Buffett. This letter is a direct result of the interview that becky did and we did a day and a half ago when he called into the show, because dave winters is furious and hes now asking coke a couple of very pointed, lets say, questions. Take a look at what these are. He says, we would like to know whether mr. Muhtar kent or howard buffett, who is the son of warren and is on the board, made the Compensation Committee and the full board of directors awear of Warren Buffetts views on the 2014 equity plan. Did mr. Buffett speak with any other cocacola directors regarding his view of the 2014 equity plan and if so, when . Wed like to know whether cocacola reached out to Institutional Investors before the Shareholder Meeting to drum up support even after it knew its largest shareholder opposed the plan. If cocacola did reach out to investors, did it state or imply that it received generally positive feedback from other investors . Now, cocacola says its Compensation Plan offers flexibility but no changes are being made to the plan at this time. And warren said on our air that he had dinner with muhtar kent in omaha, he talked to him three other times, i believe. Therefore, the question gets raised, what, from those conversations, came back to the cocacola board. Ill tell you, cocacola was reaching out to me when we were writing that column and talking about it, telling me that its a great plan. Its not any different. So how much did everybody really know about the fact that Warren Buffett was at least behind the scenes upset about this . And we also dont know exactly how warren characterized his feelings at the dinner and then subsequent to the dinner. Even when he was talking to us and to becky, he said, ive learned over the years, if youre having in fact he mentioned dinner. If youre having dinner with someone and you belch at the dinner table, youll be eating alone soon. You wonder if he was willing to tell us afterwards. Maybe he didnt raise it in i think theres more diplomacy going on here. I think im sort of coming around to the view that the public abstention as opposed to voting against it was really his way of privately trying to move the deal. Afterwards. Nobody that wasnt at the dinner, people face to face may not say things. And he also expressed how much he admires muhtar kent. David winters is assuming that he told muhtar kent exactly how he felt at the dinner. Only Warren Buffett knows whether he actually expressed dissatisfaction with the plan at the dinner or not. If he didnt because its a big difference. If he said i dont like this plan and they went out and got some support from other shareholders, thats different than if he said, you know, i dont have a strong feeling one way or another. And besides, even if hes the largest shareholder, hes not a majority shareholder. Not like it would matter if he told them dont do it. I promise you this, we will find out the answer in, literally, over the next 72 hours. Over the weekend well have Warren Buffett these questions and have him on the program on monday. Did your columnist retract anything . He had the dates all wrong as to when the interviews were. There was a major league timing issue with that. Right. Which totally changes the thrust of the story. People see what they want to see with a lot of these things anyway. At t reportedly approached im trying to think i can say what pf means to cover myself. I didnt say anything. Those are just letters. Just letters. The wall street journal says the price tag would be 40 billion. Directvs current market cap is what it is. Directv is the second biggest paid tv operator with 20 million customers. At t is a land line based business with 6 million customers. This has been talking about this for five years. For a long time t. Would create a tv giant close to the size of comcast with time warner. Theyll have close to 30 million subscribe subscribers. 30 million is a key number. Yes. At t and directv are not commenting on the story. Check out the shares of both companies right now. I can remember at least two or three years ago where you didnt know royce randall, is this going to be directv, whats happening . To me, this is about a larger issue and it goes directly to the comcast time warner deal. Theres two things. One is if they reach a deal or at least anonsnounce a deal anye soon. This would push it over this would clearly push it over the line, the comcast time warner deal. I would argue the story itself suggests to regulators the world is changing. It points at a bigger issue which Brian Roberts talks about all the time, in this new world we live in, you want to have a National Footprint. If you want to buy the sunday ticket, you cant be a local cable operator. You have to have all the pieces. Even at t suffers from this. They are in certain municipalities. If you have directv then you have the National Foot print, you can build out your broadband in certain places. It gives them flexibility and puts them on a comparable footing with comcast in a posttime warner era. The dominos are falling quickly. Its the age old argument, whenever you put Big Companies together, it doesnt necessarily mean its anticompetitive if they have a bigger footprint and are allowed to do more in terms of synergies and costs. I would argue in opposition to your argument that at t mobile would have what we wanted is to have everybody have all the spectrum and to build it out to rural areas and do all that. We decided not to allow at t to buy tmobile for competitive reasons when in fact it would have been good overall for the country overall. You still dont see it . Im on the other end of that. Id be a fan of this deal, absolutely. I dont understand that. Many of the Global Markets are closed today for may day. May day, may 1st. Lets get to ross westgate. He is standing by in london. Were you part of the celebration yesterday, ross . It was all over. Did you see the town hall meeting that we had yesterday . Are you proud to be a longtime cnbcer . The closing bell was fantastic, everybody in the studio was out for that. It was great. Really great. Were proud. Did you enjoy it, joe . I did. We had six cannons pointed different ways with confetti. We were all waiting for it. It was loud. Its a big studio. Kind of indoor fireworks which i think we dont do that enough, right . We should do those pretty much every day. We have our own indoor fireworks every day. At the beginning of squawk box we should do that. Whats closed today, ross . Take a look at this map here. Everything thats sort of gray, gr gray blue is closed for the may day holiday. Which is a celebration of labor day. Margaret thatcher, you may be interested to know, decided that the uk would not celebrate this particular holiday. She viewed it as more of a communist holiday which is why she decided not to take that in. It was up for proposal. A little bit of history i put into that. The rest of the continent is closed, apart from three separate markets today which of course include the ftse 100, the irish market, the iseq and the imx. The ftse 100 not doing too badly, up 0. 25 . Weve had good data out earlier, the manufacturing pmi coming in better than expected. Came in at 57. 3. 55 was the expectation. That boosted sterling up to the best levels against the dollar for nearly five years. Here we are, 1. 6910 is where we stand at the moment on the back of that. Can it go further . Well have to wait and see. The number of individual stocks, lloyds, first of all, this was the bank was nationalized by the uk government, theyre back in private ownership up 4. 7 . Theyre going to spin off their tsb business as well. Bskyb. The pay tv operator up 3. 6 . Monthly revenues up 5 . 74,000 net new customers. Keep your eyes on viacom, the Guardian Newspaper suggests when the results are revealed this morning, theyll also say theyre in talks to acquire channel five, currently owned by Richard Desmond who owns the express group. Thats where we stand in a thin session today, because of all those market closures. Back to you. Not so fast. You glossed over that. Andrew wasnt listening. You said the uk decided not to celebrate it because they view its is a communist holiday . Is that what you said . Well, that was the view taken by Margaret Thatcher, because it was a labor day communist is all right. Just say it. Dont take it show me the chart of the people thats what the historical thats what the historical basis of that was seen as by Margaret Thatcher as to why she decided she wasnt going to celebrate it. The uk is open and then i do see a large swath of sort of communist europe is there, closed. I knew i was opening up a can of worms by saying that. Lets talk to andrew. It was her opinion. Did you consider not coming in today in solidarity with this is a communist did you know it was may day . I didnt realize it was may day. They close the markets and the uk stays open because its a communist holiday. I have to get off the set then. I dont think you knew all these implications. This is a situation, ive come and im yom kippur. Exactly. Youre here. I get it. Thanks, ross. You know what, thats exactly how ill look at it. Its a belief but you sort of want to be here anyway. I like to work. The markets closing out the month of april on a high note. Wednesday with the dow closing at a record high. The trading day also made special. Lets show this again. Special because cnbc rang the closing bell yesterday. Did you see how i was out of the original shot . But did you see who did stake his way in there . Yogin. He knew exactly where the sides of the camera were and he positioned himself, unbeknownst to me, for the shot. We also heard from janet yellen. Were still at 45 billion a month. We also had a 0. 1 gdp number. Everybody knew it was going to be down, probably 1 and change because of the weather. That did surprise a few people. Lets see what our next guest has to say about it. Chris rupke, what was the number you were looking for before it came out, chris . I think i had an optimistic number on it, 2. 0 but it went the wrong way, 0. 1. How much do you attribute if it went to weather or not, we dont really know. The Winter Weather was making the consumer go into a hole and not stick their head out. We were surprised that Consumer Spending was completely normal in the First Quarter. In fact it was high normal, 3. 0 . Some of that was spending on utilities and housing and obamacare. Consumers were completely normal in the First Quarter which was odd. Anyway, thats really just history. First Quarter Ended a month ago on the calendar and were looking forward to greater growth in the future. We understand that. Yes. But yesterday, we have people that work here and there are some that think we can explain this slow recovery because of a lot. Theres others that seem to have apologized every single time we have a bad number, they give you sort of camouflage. Rick will Say Something and zandi will come on an say its weather. The economy is improving. We basically lost a half decade. We have explained so many bad numbers. Weve had how many spring swoons where the gdp was supposed to recover and it didnt. This goes on and on and on. Is it different this time . This will be a 3 year because were not wrong. If you look at other data like the Unemployment Rate, the future is not uncertain. Theres not the degree of uncertainty out there that the fed says. The Unemployment Rate has been coming down exactly the way it should. Why are they saying it. For the past three years. Maybe we shouldnt look at gdp. People would say the disincentives to leaving the work force i know. I dont agree with that. The participation rate. People say its the baby boomers retiring. That could be not to downplay the recovery or i call it an expansion, you know, the 0. 1 that we got in the First Quarter, if it runs 3. 0, second, third, Fourth Quarter its only going to be 2. 3 this year. So im just waiting to are that blow back to come where people go, oh, growth didnt make it. Last year was 2. 6 . 2013, this year its going to struggle to get to 2. 3. What are we going to do with that . It should be greater than 3. If its going to be 3 without the weather, it should be greater than 3. Exports were quite weak. Where are we going to be for the year then . Give me your number. It will be tough to make it to 2. 6. Its probably going to be 2. 4. Thats not good news. Its bad news. It doesnt matter. The