My take is dont get too excited. Why . Because we just found out why weve been going up. Weve been going up, s p, people trying to figure out why. You have good employment. You have workforce growth and the hours not that great because of the weather, but i think you say to yourself, well, why is the s p going up every day . Oh, employment has gotten better and thats a major switch would it shock me if the market takes some profits in this . No, because its been going up on anticipation of something good and then we got the big enchilada good. I kind of like it. The s p has rallied the past ten jobs fridays in a row. Some say thats a ridiculous metric, but maybe its time for a reversion to the mean. No metrics are ridiculous if they just look, i forgot to wish the bull market happy birthday. Of course, it never happened, you know that . You know the bull market has never happened. Jim has been on a tear lately of the haters of this market, right . Yes. The haters will have to asterisk and find something bad. You are back from the real world, the business world, you know theres something lurkingly bad about this number to undo the gains weve had in the last five years. What is it . Its many things. All you need to use is the word hallow. Hollow. Hollow, whatever you talk about. Its hollow. The gains are holley. Victory. Every line was good of course, its all asterisks, its the fed, its bernanke, yellen. No. Sometimes things are good. And the market has been good because one of the things that makes a good market is employment growth. It just works. Because you want to get away from a recession but you dont want the fed hammering you. I do not see the fed hammering you on this number. Even though the revisions to december and january not dramatic but they were up instead of down. Right. You talk about the fiveyear anniversary of the bull market which is this sunday. Heres the cover of the usa today, not only a chart with the aging bull using the horn as a chart for the s p but then the Household Wealth figures underneath that were all 9. 8 trillion richer which some people say will spur spending, jim, some say wont. It did say it was not eke qually distributed. I, of course, added an r in front of aging to be less ironic, raging will. But you dont want to get, like i said, this is why we went up and there is more wealth, but you have to caveat the wealth because it just simply didnt go it was not trickle ooh, i was going to use a reagan term. Asymmetric distribution. Maybe its the 2 and we got to double it. Its not the 1 . It would take us down aways in terms of the actual income. Whoever represents the 2 or the net worth. If you went from 1 rich to 2 risk, its remarkable. Per capita Household Wealth is almost back to the precrisis high, not there yet, but its getting there. They havent wanted to look at it. Its been a terrible thing to look at because it never got back to where it was and now its finally getting back. When you have an article like that, its not alone, theres dozens, that basically say, listen, you are back to even and so, therefore, its bad. Im not buying that. Back to even is a step towards going above even theres nothing the matter with saying things may be getting better. Theres nothing the matter with it. All right. Ive been out a few days, not out, but out on the west coast. So, here we are. We finally got this jobs report weve been waiting for and talking about most of the week and its not talking about the weather, what does it mean for Economic Growth . Are we looking over 2 1 2 percent gdp or 3 and bring it back to this market . What are we trading at . 15. 7 times earnings. I think march will be even better. I think it explains why when you have the retail sales that were so dismal like a target, the stock didnt go down. It explains why youll see a foot locker today that was up gigantically. Thats real discretionary spending. Even big lots one of the worst numbers, skull candy, only down 28 . The stock was up. People looked at negative news and said, do you know what, its okay and now maybe this is why. Were going to talk about all those names a little bit later on. As we mentioned earlier this sunday does mark the fifth anniversary of what we like to call here at cnbc the haynes bottom, thats when mark haines correctly called the stock market bottom in 2009, it was a great moment for squawk on the street and if you remember it or if you dont, take a look. However, im going to step out on a limb here. This is the big hold on, everyone. I think were at a bottom. I really do. At that point the dow was down 57 . That was a great call. I switched my whole direction when i heard that. I followed mark for years. I know. You can look back in retrospect certainly even a year later or even a few months after lets call it march 9th which was the official bottom. If i remember that, right, we come out of the crisis, we come out of what we thought was the end of the world but then we seem to be heading right back to it when it came to the s p and i remember people saying, oh, you know, forget it, were going to 400 on the s p. Now were done. Now, this is going to happen and youll have this unwind and this. So, Somebody Just commonsensewise saying this is ridiculous. A great deal of value there when ge was 6 and citi was under a buck and bankamerica was was it under a buck also . Yes. Up believable. Mark people who dont follow, didnt remember the great haines didnt understand in 1999 and 2000, he would go out on a limb and say, in 2000, this is ridiculous. And he went out on a limb then and said its ridiculous. He never went out on a limb unless he felt commonsense it was over done. With decades of watching markets and the economy and people. Yes, people. Which is something he understood really better than most and i tweeted out that quote this morning and the Immediate Response was we miss him. As do we here. Absolutely without a doubt. Lets move on to some deal news. Not unexpected, cerberus has agreed to buy safeway. The deal is worth more than 9 billion. And safeway will merge from albertsons which cerberus bought what it didnt already own from supervalu last year. They had some of albertsons and then they bought the rest, the deal will give safeway shareholders what they are saying is 42 bucks a share, 32. 50 a share in cash and the continued spinoff thats coming. Of one of their units and then they will have a cvr based on other asset sales. You add it all up and you get to 40. Ive been tracking this deal as we know. On monday i spoke about it. The likelihood it would be cerberus and also at 38 plus the stock seemed to be discounting a 40 deal and its got a little bit of hair on it if the sense if you are a risk arbiter and hedge the various parts, you cant do it. You cant borrow the thing they are spinning off. You cant hedge a cvr and the Dividend Income theyll be receiving if you are a foreign holder, you dont want it, you cant hold it, so there may be selling pressure. Whats perhaps most interesting is private equity borrowing over 7 billion to get a deal done. The moneys there if they want it. Cerberus has not always been the best of buyers but they did follow through here and got a definitive agreement. There is a breakup fee and when it ends its a 250 million breakup fee. Why is that important . Well, again, weve been talking about whether kroger might have some interest here. Im not picking up that krogers in there. Really looking hard. They are not expected to show up at least based on what im hearing. Maybe some of those things that will be sold kroger will show up for. Interesting. Kroger Conference Call they just reported. They kept trying to get them to take the bait. Please, tell us. And they kept going back to the Harris Teeter acquisition which was very successful and how they dont like to lever up their Balance Sheet. One of the great operators doesnt want to lever up their Balance Sheet, but they did succeed in albertsons, they are not losers in this segment. No. Were talking about as you might expect synergies that will accrue. Right. To albertsons, cerberus which owns albertsons with the acquisition of safeway but its a big deal not that safeway hasnt been private before. It has. 1986 and went public in 1990. A kkr deal from many years ago. Under some pressure from one of its largest shareholder that owns 6 of the stock some time back, they sold a bit. It ended up where a lot of people expected it might. But there were plenty that were short on the stock. Thanks for the nice emails. Ubs goes from sell to hold this morning on safeway. Gutsy. Nice. Nice. Nice piece in the Washington Post this morning, too, about whats happened to supermarkets in general over the past ten years. Theyve lost how many points a share to other retailers . 15. Really . 15. As a group. Big Grocery Stores losing to amazon. Losing to whole foods. Losing to cvs, right . Thats where you can buy food these days. Without a doubt. Kroger celebrated a 0. 5 share gain in their Conference Call and cited that they were taking some well, didnt say directly from walmart. I thought that was interesting because the losses are so staggering they are willing to pat themselves on the back for anything. Yeah. Spending a lot of time on amazon as i have of late, they are early days here with fresh. Very, very early days in terms of amazon competing with grocers so to speak. Came up on the costco call and you could tell kind of, like, dripping sarcasm, yeah, sure, you know, come get me. But amazon is going to come get everyone. Underestimate amazon, that would be smart. Theyre not. I think they always have that same thing in the back of their mind which means we have to play by earnings per share and amazon can do whatever it wants. Do you feel that way when youre out there . Yeah. That is a frustration for many people. I dont blame costco which is a great operator. Coming up this morning well get the white houses first reaction to that jobs number, of course. The labor secretary, thomas perez, will join us live. We will be right back. Tall the building is, or how ornate the halls are. It doesnt matter if there are granite statues, or big mahogany desks. When working with an investment firm, whats really important is whether the people behind the desks actually stand behind what they say. Introducing the schwab accountability guarantee. If youre not happy with one of our participating Investment Advisory services, well refund your program fee from the previous quarter. Its no guarantee against loss and other fees and expenses may still apply. Chuck vo standing by your word, thats what matters the most. Okay. Lot of retail news to walk you through this morning. Gap down sharply after the retailer reported an unexpected decline in february sales partly because of the weather. Big lots, though, up big in the premarket after beating estimates for 4q and foot locker shares are up after 4q numbers beat forecasts. Big lots beat by a nickel. Getting it out of canadian business. Not a lot of color in the release. No. But the call did begin at 8 00 a. M. You have the good, bad and the ugly and the ugly is going higher. Big lots has been horrendous and they werent as horrendous as we thought. The gap just reported a good number, so when you saw this reversion, look at these numbers, gab global down 10 , Banana Republic down seven. Old navy down six. We thought good things were going to happen because the last quarter was so good. Thats the weather, right . I mean, come on. Okay. Right. And then ultimately foot locker was up 5. 5. What would they have done with Better Weather . Seven . Eight . Im just saying i dont know. Today were looking and saying well care about the weather on one side of the street and not the other. I think gap, im not crazy about gap stores but i dont think it should be down that much. Im not crazy about big lots and i dont think it should be down that much. Abercrombie repositioning hollister all this time trying to be more like h m more fast fashion. It will be more interesting to see if the particultactical ter help the overstored environment. Maybe they are no longer going to go commando over hollister. All right. Well, i guess that brings that block to a close. They are talking about the idea of a management secession and we kind of want that. Jeffries is in the wall of shame. Just kind of feel like still. Also like mason fashion fashion backward comments about yes. People and just left me cold. I dont know about how you felt. I didnt really focus on them as much. Just put it this way, they were not politically correct, how about that . Yes, i do recall that part of those comments. One thing h r block, the average tax refund so far this year 3,034 up 3 from last year and 48 million of americans already have it in direct deposit and i wonder how much of that is going to go to a Cash Register in the next, i dont know, four to six weeks. Spending power. I had Pinnacle Foods on, birdseye and duncan hines. And no one is talking about the obamacare pushback, in other words, that obama pushed back the regulations for small business, maybe they started hiring. The anniversary of the payroll tax increase, does that start to help in a way . I think so. These are all positives and you might say that they are whatever the sequester caused in terms of damage, anniversary of that soon, too. The government played a negative role and this is the first month when the government gets off the backs of its people. Its a reagan line. The trickle down. Was it a reagan or trotsky line . No, trotsky believed the workers should own the means of production or its russian prune juice. Anyway, well keep an eye on all of that. As we said the anniversary of the market and the retail news. The euro is above 139 for the first time in 2 1 2 years. Weve not even mentioned that. If you are an exporter in europe or you are doing the ppg and eating a lot of the Big Companies have big european business, they will beat numbers off this. I should have mentioned that right off the top. Yeah. Well get more to it closer to the bell. When we come back, its jobs friday as you know. Nice number 175, what should you be watching today . Well get cramers mad dash one more look at futures which did extend their gains nicely, although we are off the highs. A lot more squawk on the street from the nyse straight ahead. For tapping into a wealth of experience. For access to one of the top Wealth Management firms in the country. For a team of Financial Professionals who provide customized solutions. For all of your Wealth Management and retirement goals, discover how pnc Wealth Management can help you achieve. Visit pnc. Com wealthsolutions to find out more. announcer scottrade knows our and invest their own way. With scottrades smart text, i can quickly understand my charts, and spend more time trading. Their quick trade bar lets my account follow me online so i can react in realtime. Plus, my local scottrade office is there to help. Because they know i dont trade like everybody. I trade like me. Im with scottrade. announcer ranked highest in Investor Satisfaction with selfdirected services by j. D. Power and associates. Because im happy clap around if you feel like a roll without a proof because im happy clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth because im happy even on three hours sleep i can get going. Redeye . Absolutely. You are probably out there and people are talking about this ebay again. The land of venture capitalists. I miss you talking about ebay because of the missive and Marc Andreessen firing back at icahn almost writing a letter a day on this. As we talk so often, it changed from a debate about the merits of whether this company should split up paypal or not which, by the way, is worth coming back to. Its back to andreessen and his actions during the skype transaction. Andreessen fires back at icahn and said carl icahn 2014 would take a dim view of the Business Ethics of carl icahn 2005 given various things that he did on the board of xo and weighs that he went about making decisions. Yeah. He sold it to himself. And selling things to himself. I thought that was a really interesting point. It was a different era. Xo that was all insider. Do you know what, this is the kind of thing where andreessen is reacting to what happened on squawk box the other day where icahn called in and said this is the most egregious it didnt take long for them to find something equally as egregious. And Silicon Valley is ral rallying around ebay, reed hoffman defended why paypal belongs with ebay and defending the company and john donahoe. Andreessen now finally firing back on his own sake. Remember, hes on the board of facebook, hp, and ebay. This larger question of whether there are conflicts inherent to a venture capitalist being on public boards, many would say our expertise is unique in a lot of ways and our Technology Understanding and put up with the conflicts because were worth it. As for skype the only thing ill say is people that are really interested, go back and look at the debate around the first deal. The intellectual property of skype was not owned by ebay and that injected an element of complexity into the negotiations they were having with skypes founders at the time. I didnt know that. When you look at i have to say when you look at how andreessen acted its very unclear to me whether the charges that icahn is bringing have a great deal of merit. When it went to 8 billion it had the ip. Yes, they brought the ip back in. And you had the founders back in and, of course, ebay owned 30 . And it changed a lot of the willingness of a microsoft to buy a company that didnt have the ip that might get sued by its very founders who had the right to say you cant transfer the ip, youre only licensing it. Theres the insight that i missed. Thank you for coming back. Well talk cliffs natural which is a stock you know very well. Well, there you see u. S. Labor secretary thomas perez, hes going to react to todays job number. Hell join us live on a first on cnbc. Got the opening bell just a few minutes away. Stay here with us for a squawk on the street on a friday. [ girl ] my mom, she makes underwater fans that are powered by the moon. She can print amazing things, right