Scott Bessent

So I can tell you there's going to be a bigger availability of credit.

I can tell you that we are not going to blow out the budget deficit and cause, you will not see an MIT study that says that

The Trump 2.0 caused inflation through the budget deficit.

And I can also tell you that we are working to increase working wages.

In President Trump's first term, hourly workers did better than supervisory workers.

Bottom 50% of households had a bigger increase in net worth than the top 10%.

So we are trying to level the playing field.

David, I think it goes back to the idea that pure unfettered free trade was not fair trade.

When you have competitors, China, Vietnam, some others, sometimes in Europe,

that have high subsidies, then this idea that perfect Ricardian equivalence exists doesn't.

And we can see by these distortions that developed, these huge capital pools that have developed because of the imbalances.

So that's one point, but...

And that's trade policy.

But on the other side, there's national security policy.

And the only good thing I can say about COVID is it woke us up to the national security, took us out of this paradigm.

that elongated, free-flowing supply chains, wherever they may be, were the best, that the most smoothly functioning was desirable.

Well, it turns out that the most efficient is not always the safest, the most robust, or the soundest.

And we saw that during COVID.

We discovered that the Chinese became unreliable suppliers.

India and some of the other countries, they acted surprise, surprise in their national interest.