Scott Bessent on Tucker

a treasury secretary that seems to know a thing or two

Now that the tariffs have hit the fan, Tucker Carlson went to Washington DC to interview Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Hmm, I thought; this is my chance to find out if Bessent knows his head from a hole in the ground.

After listening to the 60 min interview I felt a lot better. Looks like Bessent knows his stuff. Here are my takeaways from the transcript on TuckerCarlson.com.

Reagan Years Weren’t All Sunshine

I was a freshman in college when Ronald Reagan came in in 1980, and a new day in America, and when I talk to people now and they look back and they looked at the Reagan years so fondly. Yes. I remember what it was like and it was choppy and the president [was] very choppy[.] Reagan stood the course and look this is not an invitation but… at one point in the early 80s a farmer showed up with a shotgun at the Federal Reserve to the kill Paul Volcker for raising rates. So like I said that's not an [invitation] for anybody for action but it was a tough time. And then in 1984, President Reagan won re-election with 49 states,

Big Picture on lower 50 percent

And Donald Trump has been talking about this for 40 years.

For years, the American worker Middle class has been eviscerated, American workers have taken it on the chin, and we're just starting to see some of the research now. We're seeing research on what's called the China shock from 2004.

So over the past 30 years there are

these massive distributional problems where the coast[s] have done great. And the middle of the country… they have just seen quality of life, life expectancy decline, they don't think their children are going to do better than they are, and a lot of people don't care.

Stock Market Crash

Recent stock market decline started with DeepSeek on the AI front.

I can tell you that this market decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of DeepSeek. So the so-called Mag-7, the tech stocks, had been doing very well for about 18 months, led the market. And I think that there was kind of a real dose of reality in what was going on in AI.

Europe

Look, the Europeans, we look back and there was a famous meeting where President Trump told the Europeans that you're insane for building Nord Stream 2. What are you doing? You already get most of your energy from Russia and you're going to double down on it? And they did. And look what happened. So we blew it up. Somebody did. Some Norwegian fishermen bumped into it is what I read, but look, the Europeans go kicking and screaming, but I think they're going to have to rebalance, too. Germany has a very imbalanced export economy, and they were on the verge of deindustrialization. They were the opposite of us. They had expensive energy. Yes, they were depending on… Italy and the countries in the south to keep the euro suppressed, and they were selling into China, and now China is becoming their competitor.

China

So the Chinese have a very different economic system. They have low cost, some would call it literally slave labor. They subsidize industry with subsidized loans. They have a lot of non-tariff barriers.

On the day that the market tanked another 6 percent, and China did its Big Boy stuff with retaliatory tariffs, Bessent asserted that the Chinese economy is in a mess and experiencing deflation.

Well, I don't know if they can retaliate for a couple of reasons. If you look at the history, and I used to teach economic history, when you look at the history, we are the debtor nation. We have the trade deficits. The surplus nation is in the weaker position, because the Chinese business model, and Tucker, by the way, the Chinese business model and the economy are the most unbalanced, imbalanced in the history the modern world. We've never seen anything like this in terms of their export level relative to their GDP, relative to the population. So I think it is going to be very difficult for them to try to change the model. They're in a deflationary recession slash depression right now. They're trying to export their way out of it, and we can't let them do that.

Trump’s Leadership

We all take President Trump's lead. We know we had a meeting yesterday morning, we had meeting after the announcement in the Rose Garden before we went out doing media and as you know, he's his own best spokesman. Nobody can do it better and then we fan out and we are all unified behind this and his vision, that's why we're here. If you didn't want to be part of it, you shouldn't be here.

Wrapup

Listening to Scott Bessent I don’t hear educated-class narrative. I don’t get the feeling I am on the receiving end of committee generated talking points. I get the feeling I am listening to a man who knows a thing or two.

All in all I got the impression that the Trump team knows what it is doing and is acting on the assumption that the rest of the world needs us more than we need them. Is this true? We shall find out.

One thing that is becoming clear about the new Trump administration is that it has a pretty good idea what it wants and how to get there. And it has courage, a willingness to stick its head above the parapet and just go for it.