Bessent Celebrates the ‘Trump Boom’ with Breitbart: ‘Ya Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’
At a policy event this morning hosted by Breitbart News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded to the news that the U.S. economy grew at a much stronger-than-expected three percent rate in the second quarter by paraphrasing Al Jolson’s famous quote: “Ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Bessent viewed the news as a vindication of the Trump administration’s economic policies against the handwringing naysayers. “I was trying to explain to people who panicked on April 2 — we’re doing peace deals, trade deals, tax deals. They are all coming together,” he said. “A lot of it is just confidence and momentum coming back. I was never concerned about what was going to happen. There was a lot of disinformation, lot of ‘whataboutism.’ — what if we had this in place, what if tariffs do this, what if that.”
“The Trump boom is real,” Bessent declared. And, as he told his counterparts in China, the “world is with us now” in reorienting global trade via Trump’s tariff policies.
During his wide-ranging interview with Breitbart’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle, Bessent touched on everything from his trade negotiations with China to the re-shoring of America’s manufacturing capacity, the financial crackdown on fentanyl trafficking, the “Trump Accounts” initiative, boosting working class wages, and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s attempt to build a “Caracas on the Hudson.”
The Fed’s ‘Tariff Derangement Syndrome’ and the Cracked Consensus
Just hours before Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the central bank was keeping interest rates unchanged, Bessent told Breitbart, “I’m not expecting a rate cut today. The market is pricing in rate cuts, and what I’m hoping that we can see out of the leadership of the Federal Reserve is a little bit of imagination.”
He didn’t hold back on criticizing the Fed for being “wrong on tariff inflation,” noting that the June economic data saw a “statistically insignificant” increase in prices that amounted to a “rounding error.”
“The dollar depreciated ten percent. A normal economist would say perhaps that ten basis points might have been from dollar depreciation rather than” tariffs, he said, adding that “we’ve gone from Trump Derangement Syndrome to Tariff Derangement Syndrome.”
“That was a long way of saying I admired Alan Greenspan in the ’90s,” he continued. “I thought he was a fantastic Federal Reserve chair through the ’80s, through the ’90s, because he always had an open mind.”
Fed Governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman might agree with that assessment. Our prediction last month that cracks were emerging in the central bank’s fragile consensus proved true. For the first time in more than 30 years, two members of the Federal Open Market Committee — Waller and Bowman — cast dissenting votes on the board’s decision to keep rates unchanged. The last time this happened was 1993.
We will have a full analysis of the Breitbart policy event — which also featured interviews and a panel discussion with the Treasury Department’s Joe Lavorgna, the White House’s Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid, and Indiana Sen. Jim Banks — in tomorrow’s Breitbart Business Digest.
In the meantime, enjoy the video of the full event.
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