Episode 5566: One On One With treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

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Bannon`s War Room 57 min 4 speakers 5 chapters transcribed 1 month ago

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How does Scott Bessent explain recent trends in inflation, wages, and shelter costs?

Scott Gottlieb 0:00

Patience to you that the underlying problem with shelter or with services or with wages, are there signs that maybe the good numbers we just saw on the past reports, will that continue even though oil is back up and give Chair Warsh some leeway in September?

Scott Bessent 0:22

Well, again, I don't think that Chair Warsh or indeed the overall FOMC, you've got to remember, Joe, when they raise rates here, if they raise rates, they're looking at long and variable lead time. So they've got to be thinking what what's going on nine, 12, 18 months out. And I do think that there are a lot of things going on there. You know, we're we're seeing growth. Shelter, owner's equivalent rent, rents come down. And that's where core inflation is. And the media doesn't want to report it. But President Trump has done it again, same as he did in his first term. In the president's first term, hourly workers did better than supervisory workers. And now what we're seeing now is the bottom – quartile of wage earners have had year-over-year 5.5% wage gains, and that's three times more than the top quartile.

Scott Bessent 1:28

So look, this inflation and this affordability crisis that the Biden era got us, you know, this big increase in our step function, increase in price levels. There are two ways to combat that. There's you can slow the inflation, which I do believe the core inflation is slowing. But for working Americans, real wage gains and we can see that the bottom 25 percent of workers had a two percent wage gain and uh with everything that we're seeing in the media is difficult to discern but we think that the american people will be feeling that over time and they're also feeling the benefits of the working families tax cuts i i'm They also oversee the IRS, and 44% of American households had one of the president's signature policies, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, reduced taxes for seniors on Social Security, and deductibility of auto loans.

Scott Bessent 2:31

So we are starting to see... I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy. I can say here definitively the K-shaped economy is over and we're seeing more of a C economy where the lower end of wage earners are finally calling it back, just like they did in President Trump's first term.

Stephen K. Bannon 2:54

Ear of Allure 2026. Nothing short of a star turn this morning by our former contributor, the Secretary of Treasury Scott Besson on Squawk Box. 35 minutes without commercial break. We won't get that long, but we're going to have it without commercial break. Also, Secretary Besson. I just want to make sure the audience understands this. I want to go back in time. You were an advisor to President Trump before the campaign, then on the campaign, then you were selected as Secretary of Treasury. You and President Trump have had an idea from the beginning to get back to everything that converged together in the fall and Christmas of 2019. You talk about that a lot. Can you walk us through the original plan, including the supply-side tax cut, everything you guys were focused on,

Stephen K. Bannon 3:41

How is that working through today, particularly as I think we're seeing a lot of green sprouts in the economy? And it's kind of worked its way, at least so far, through the excursion we've had in the Middle East, sir.

Scott Bessent 3:55

Steve, good to be back here on War Room. I miss you, miss the posse. Steve. It was great during the campaign when I was a little freer to speak. But that's a great question you ask. And what we're seeing in President Trump's second term is back to the future, because in President Trump's first term, you were there, you were part of it. And then by January 2020, we had an amazingly strong economy. President Trump was probably up 8% in the popular polls nationally, which for an incumbent president, it was out of the park. Then COVID came. And what we've been trying to do is get back to that status. And I think we've done it in an even more powerful way here because The working families tax cut signed last July 4th not only had the corporate side, it's more of a barbell on this side.

Scott Bessent 5:02

So on the corporate side, full expensing for equipment, for factories, for ag structures, and then for working people on the