The Chinese are “on their heels” because “the world is now with us,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a policy discussion with Breitbart News on Wednesday.
Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle mentioned that Bessent recently got back from Stockholm, Sweden, meeting with the Chinese delegation about trade talks.
“This is your third such meeting, I believe, with them. Can you talk to us a little bit about what happened there, and then we’ll get into kind of some of the specifics about where things go from here,” Boyle asked.
Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a policy discussion with Breitbart News on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. (Matthew Perdie/Breitbart News)
“What I can tell you is, I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that they were a little on their heels, because the week before, we had just done the Japanese trade deal,” he said, noting that they also struck a major deal with the European Union, and the U.S. is set to meet with the Koreans today.
“So our largest trading partners we have trade deals with, so the Chinese, who like to project strength and under this monolithic view, they were on their heels because it was like, ‘Listen, guys, this is the way it is, and you’ve got a pretty good deal going, but the rest of the world is now with us,” Bessent said. “And you’re not going to get a special deal.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a policy discussion with Breitbart News on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. (Matthew Perdie/Breitbart News)
“The Chinese have to rebalance their economy. They have the most unbalanced, imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world. There’s 30 percent of manufacturing. They have a current account surplus that’s equivalent to 2 percent of global GDP. We haven’t seen that since the 1870s, 1880s when there was the British Empire, and I just said that the world’s with us now, because for a while, it looked in April, May, like the U.S. was alone against the world,” Bessent said, making the point that this is no longer the case.
Because the U.S. has deals with top trading partners, we have more leverage, he continued.
“And as you know, nobody generates leverage like the president,” Bessent remarked.
When asked about President Trump’s remark that the goal is to get China to “open up” and if Bessent, personally, is getting the sense that China will open its economy to American goods, Bessent said it will move at a “very deliberate pace.”
“I was in the macroeconomic investment business for 35 years, and I think probably the most overused saying recently is the Ernest Hemingway saying, how did you go bankrupt slowly, then quickly? I think that with a lot of these big economies, that it’s a slow process and it’ll happen quickly,” he said.
“I remember the Japanese had the bubble burst. They didn’t want to do much about it, then … President Trump’s great friend, Prime Minister Abe, came into office in 2012 and boom, the Japanese hit the accelerator and never looked back,” Bessent said. “So my sense is that it’s not going to be a straight line that they are doing.”
“They have five-year planning sessions. They are meeting for the planning sessions. It’s called the five-year plan. They’re doing their five-year plan in September, October. They’ll announce the results of that in February. So, I encourage them that if they are going to rebalance to more of a consumer economy, to make that known,” the Treasury Secretary added.
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