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Now that Wall Street finally realizes that we are in a bull market, in fact we've been in 1 since inflation peak last fall, we have to ask ourselves what could upend the juggernaut.

I spent a lot of time defending the rally from a legion of critics who doubted every move higher until we were already up huge from the lows.

But today my colleague David Faber asked me what could derail this market and its key leaders.

I gave him a glib answer about inflation.

I know it's not good enough and I had to spend the whole day trying to figure out a real response and that's what you're going to get right now.

Let me tell you what could potentially slaughter this bull.

An idea I'm willing to entertain after a nice day.

The first bull slayer really is inflation.

The best performers of late, the Microsofts, the Apples, the Alphabets, the Adobe's, are going up on the same news again and again at the same time.

This is what's known as multiple expansion.

Wall Street's willing to pay more for the stocks in a world with lower inflation and lower bond yields than I think they should.

I would reverse stocks to go up on changes in fundamentals.

No, they're going up on a change in perception.

Of course, because this perception not accelerated earnings growth, the whole move could turn on a dime if inflation flares up again.

A couple of red hot housing numbers, maybe a pickup in wage inflation as all the infrastructure jobs hit us next year.

Well, that would put an end to the tech stock leadership that's been at the forefront of this rally because momentum is indeed a two-way street.

The second bull slayers related more inflation would convince the Fed that it needs to raise interest rates aggressively to the point where short-term treasuries become way too attractive versus any stock.

If short rates get high enough, money will deflow out of this market like water, and they aren't that far from being that way.

I mean, that would be necessary for the Fed to take them up so high, but well, it would easily slaughter the bull and the Fed could do that.

Third, we could be toppled by something I really despise and I happen to despise froth.

When the positive action just gets way too crazy, too frantic.

Yes, the frantic desire to throw money at anything remotely related to AI has me absolutely worried.

Microsoft's charging a great deal for its copilot AI product, so its stock deserved a run on the news yesterday but today Apple jumped on news that it's contemplating generative AI at least a tool while Salesforce soared when it announced its AI price chart.

These are not events that should be tackled on billions and billions of additional market capitalization.

That's part of the market's egregious froth, chimerical moves, frankly.

Needless to say, the lynchpin for all of AI is NVIDIA.

And NVIDIA, if it ever falters, well, that could crush the entire AI move.

I can't imagine what it would take to topple NVIDIA here, but unimaginable things happen all the time.

Of course, I don't think it's likely, which is why we own it for the Chapel Trust and we don't trade it.

Fourth bull slayer, these are all, remember, just perspective and it's just putting it in context of what could happen that could go wrong, is the exogenous.

I'm talking about China wanting to invade Taiwan.

If they can successfully take it over, and please remember, they think it's theirs already, that would be a disaster for the U.S.

Economy because so many of our semiconductors come from Taiwan.

The Chinese Communist Party probably wouldn't do this.

Because they run the risk of starting World War 3.

But the chances of this happening are much higher than I'd like to be.

I mean, for instance, the moment Janet Yellen left China after supposedly productive meetings, the PRC launched yet another flyover of Taiwanese airspace.

It's not inconceivable that they risk trying to take it over.

Nobody thought Russia would be crazy enough to invade Ukraine, did it?

Hey, speaking of Ukraine, without the right equipment from the West, it's looking like this war could turn into a long and bloody stalemate.

Then again, we got to wonder what Putin might do if Ukraine has a breakthrough.

Maybe he's nuts enough to roll out the nukes.

Not something Wall Street wants to be worried about.

Here's hoping that the next coup attempt succeeds.

Ukraine needs jets and helicopters from the West or this war is going on a long time and jets and helicopters do not seem to be in the cars.

6 Bulls later right now we have a dearth of IPOs and secondary offerings but when you listen to James Gorman, the outgoing CEO of Morgan Stanley the other day, it sounds like he's seeing some green shoots in the equity market.

If we get a ton of IPOs and a ton of insider selling stock, that excess supply could cause the market to roll over.

No, actually, I should say We're in the last few days.

I don't feel that way, but we actually are historically.

There just isn't that much stock for sale up here, or we wouldn't be seeing such outside moves.

But if the IPO market comes back in a big way, that's gonna be a problem for the average.

Seventh, the bull dies if we actually have a recession.

We get earnings from all the biggest banks, and they're certainly not seeing any cracks in the edifice.

There's not even that much pressure on commercial real estate.

The hard landing scenario requires all those things to be happening.

The average person has far more cash than they did in

These are there are far more jobs available than there are people.

Unemployment is still at near record lows.

I mean, companies in the service industry keep expanding as more and more people are traveling or at least going out after spending so long working from home.

Eighth, the bulls might go to the slaughterhouse once the short sellers have covered all their shorts.

Right now, the bears are being crushed, okay?

Carvana, 1 of the most heavily shorted stocks of our time has run from $3 to $55 more than that later.

And we've got a ton of fintech stocks making similar huge moves.

Thanks to short squeezes, money managers were just shorting all sorts of stocks very aggressively in anticipation of recession.

That doesn't seem to be coming, But eventually the shorts will finish buying back their stock to close out their losing short positions.

And even if that doesn't slay the bull, it's going to hurt the bull.

If we have another serious bank run that nobody saw coming.

So far, no regional has shown anything like what Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic has happened to.

Finally, maybe companies don't deliver on earnings that could put the bull down.

Maybe there's no turn in Amazon Web Services, so Amazon takes numbers down.

Maybe Apple doesn't deliver on the hardware, and there's a service revenue shortfall.

Maybe Alphabet shows no real growth and it causes a cloud price war.

Maybe the Justice Department scores a plum when it goes after Alphabet for monopolistic pricing.

Maybe Meta spends too much money on its Meta product and not enough on Reels.

Maybe the core of Microsoft turns out to be not doing as well.

Maybe Netflix is really indeed worried about the future.

We could see some shortfalls in health care, especially pharma, as part of the slightly under the radar provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that the drug companies claim could crush their earnings because it would let Medicare negotiate lower prices.

Now, I don't know how many of these negatives would have to surface to slaughter the bull.

The bottom line though, there's enough money still betting on a recession or sitting on the sidelines of short term treasuries that I think this bull can still have forward momentum.

Sure something could go badly wrong, but for the moment I think we're too early into this move for it to end any time soon.

So many investors are only just waking up right now to the fact that a bull market even exists which makes it mighty hard to conjure up a serious bear thesis.

So I know you like the beverage giant PepsiCo, but I want to talk about snacks, pets and dividends, all 3 of which General Mills does well.

And their stock dropped after a recent forecast, citing inflationary choppers.

But General Mills has been pretty resilient during recessions and market sell-off.

So I want to hear what are you thinking on General Mills?

People are worried that the dividend isn't high enough to protect itself from bonds.

People worry about consumer practice, good stocks.

I think General Mills is a great long-term stock.

I'm actually calling in for my dad who's almost 90 years young and has been a decade long shareholder of Dominion Energy.

It had a post pandemic high of around $87 but can't seem to break out of a narrow trading range in the low 50s these days.

It's a big part of his portfolio and we'd love to know your thoughts.

I want them to come on and I want them to explain to me how they could be paying such a high dividend given the fact that there's so many things that I think are checkered about it.

But congratulations to your dad for being 90 years young.

Jim, Thanks to you and to the club, which I'm a member, I realized some gains via artificial intelligence.

Yeah, I'm looking ahead now for businesses who may be implementing AI.

I'm thinking of a stock, call letters, GEHC, GE Healthcare Technologies Inc.

You're a club member, so you know we've been buying the stock.

Because you're going to need an MRI before you get into any of the Alzheimer's programs.

AI, they're going to have to talk about on the call because I right now do not know them as such, but let's find out.

And thank you for being a member of the CNBC Investing Club.

Wall Street's finally realized we're in a bull market.

And I think the bull still has forward momentum.

On Mad Money Tonight, it seems like things have settled after the regional banking crisis, so I'm going straight to the source with First Horizon CEO to see how things stand now.

Ben Carvana announced earnings this morning early in the early unexpected.

And after sharing plans for a big restructuring of the company's debt, I'm learning more with the company's top brass.

And ahead of the hotly anticipated Barbie movie, I'm seeing if this could be the inflection point for the toy maker.

Send Jim an email to madmoney at CNBC.com or give us a call at 1-800-743-CNBC.

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Now we know we've got some fantastic numbers from the big national banks this early season.

But how about the smaller regionals that were right in the blast radius of the mini banking crisis this spring?

Take First Horizon, a Tennessee-based regional bank with a big footprint in the southeast that almost got acquired by Toronto Dominion for $25 a share before the regulators blocked the deal.

This morning, First Horizon put in kind of an unremarkable quarter.

A modest revenue miss, coupled with a small earnings beat from strong income and better expense control.

What's the bull case for an independent FHN now that Wall Street doesn't like the regional bank stocks?

Let's go with the always bankable Brian Jordan.

He's the chairman and CEO of First Horizon.

Find out more about the quarter and where his company's headed.

All right, so Brian, first of all, I didn't expect to see you again.

I thought that this era was over, you had made a fortune for shareholders.

What's it like to have to basically stay, almost start over in an era where something happened that you had nothing to do with broke down.

Yeah you would have to put me in the camp of extraordinarily surprised that we're getting to do this again as well.

I would say that it was in 1 sense a huge disappointment for our shareholders.

On the other hand, our bankers had never stopped growing and serving our customer base.

And so when the merger got terminated and we started on what's the next chapter.

We went back to doing what we've done for the last 159 years, which is to serve our customers, serve our communities with enthusiasm and passion.

And that momentum is showing up in the back half of this quarter and the momentum we see going into the third quarter

I don't want to belabor this because it had nothing to do with you, but I want you to tell people this was no, at your end, this deal was not stopped.

It was by regulators, but by you say regulators, it was because of your acquirer, not because of First Horizons financials.

It had nothing to do with First Horizons, and we made that clear in our press release a couple of different times.

We're disappointed, but we understand that sometimes things like that happen and TD's inability to get timely approval.

We reached this termination agreement and we hit the ground running.

Aren't you afraid that there's some other bank that's going to come along given the fact that you guys would double the price that you are now?

Or do you think that the era of mergers is kind of come and gone and you're about to stay strong and independent?

Yeah, If I answer the question 2 ways, 1 is I think clearly we're a more valuable franchise today than we were in February of 2022 when we struck that merger agreement.

And I know that the market and the economy and interest rates have moved a tremendous amount since then, but we completed the integration of our Iberia Bank merger, our franchise, and our footprint looks tremendously good.

And we're going to do what's right in the long term for our shareholders.

I do think that the merger M&A picture is more cloudy today than at any time in my banking career.

If you put it in perspective, we were in this merger agreement

and a half months and it sort of terminated as a surprise to us in May of this year.

And I think the banking industry is now in a state of trying to figure out what are the rules of the road, How does M&A fit into the regulatory framework that we face?

And we were getting what I would describe as somewhat mixed messages in terms of support of M&A.

But at the end of the day, we're going to stay focused on serving customers and communities, and we're going to build the franchise value from where we start.

that literally is in the hottest growth areas throughout our country.

Every single 1 of them you touched, including the fastest growing in our country, which is where you're located.

Give me the tenor of business, because you guys are in the heartland.

And I think it was your CNBC state rankings last week that came out, and we're in 3 of the top 4, and we have all of, most of our states are in the top 10.

We have great growth markets, and the economy here continues to be very, very strong.

We see it in our customers that business continues to be good.

It's not record years like we saw last year, but business continues to be good.

People are working really hard to hire and recruit.

There's a lot of people moving into our footprint.

So we're very optimistic about the part of the country that we have an opportunity to serve, and we think that will serve our shareholders very, very well over the long term.

So many people worried about commercial real estate.

But he said, listen, we had to go over building by building, basically, because we wanted to be sure.

How is commercial real estate in your 3 hot markets?

Yeah the commercial real estate markets are still okay.

I know people are concerned about refinance activity whether it's later this year or next year with higher interest rates.

And particularly with respect to office, they're concerned about occupancy levels as well.

That said, we're not seeing any significant signs of deterioration in our portfolio.

We've seen a very modest level of downgrades and the criticized or classified more importantly and we feel good about in our footprint the ability to to see office and other commercial real estate absorbed fairly quickly.

And we're not in a state of panic about it at this point at all.

I've watched you grow at this institution, what you've done.

You've really created maybe the finest regional bank in the country.

And some people are just going to ride off to the sunset, be pretty darn happy at how they've done for shareholders for themselves.

What's it like to discover, you know what, I'm back in action, I've got to run this place again.

Yes, it's absolutely and I'm excited about it.

I've been CEO at First Horizon now for roughly

As I've said to a number of people over the course of the last several months and the last 15 months, this organization is like a part of my family and I'm I'm excited with the group of people I get to work with the talented bankers that I get to serve alongside I'm excited to be a part of it and we're all excited about our opportunity now to deliver on the promise of our merger of equals with Iberia Bank going back to

Well, look, I want to congratulate you on sticking around doing stuff for your shareholders again.

It what stopped this deal had nothing to do with this man.

Brian Jordan, Chairman, President and CEO of First Horizon, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Coming up, the car Vending machines go up and down.

But this stock has lately stuck to the former direction.

From Wall Street to K Street and Main Street, the markets may close, your money never stops.

Follow and listen to CNBC's Last Call on your favorite podcast platform today.

This morning we got a stunning quarter and a huge debt reduction from none other than Carvana, the web-based used car retailer best known for its automated car vending machines.

Gigantic soda machine looking like garages that dispense what you buy.

Now Carvana already had a monster move, but it's heavily shorted.

So I always hesitate to recommend it because you can never tell how much of these gains are because of a short squeeze.

That's definitely part of the reason the stock could surge 40% today.

But man, I did not expect the news to be this good, and it is good.

Carvanhaven beat the numbers on every key line with much higher than expected sales, record gross profit per unit, and their final, the positive EBITDA number since, it's been since 2021.

More important, the shorts have been ganging up on this 1 because they thought it's got an ugly balance sheet, but today they announced a major devastation.

And coupled with an at-the-market stock offering, Carvano will be able to lower its interest expense by a staggering $430 million over the next 2 years.

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Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 7/19/23