Washington – Treasury secretary, Scott Besent, said Sunday that “was not at all” worried about the stock market, which has submerged several times in the midst of the tariff threats of President Donald Trump.
“I have been in the investment business for 35 years, and I can tell you that corrections are healthy. They are normal. What is not healthy is direct,” Besent said during an interview in “Know the Press” of NBC News. “
The main rates of shares have been reduced in recent weeks amid Trump’s tariff threats. CNBC previously reported that the value of the S&P 500 has decreased by approximately $ 5 billion in three weeks.
Trump has hesitated with tariffs with Canada and Mexico, two of the closest commercial partners in the United States, while threatening steep tariffs in other allies of the United States such as the European Union. The president has also implemented radical tariffs on aluminum and steel. Besent also confirmed that Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs in other countries will begin on April 2.
“I am not worried about the markets. In the long term, if we implement a good fiscal policy, deregulation and energy security, the markets will do it very well,” Besent said.
Stock market fluctuations have caused fears of longer -term economic problems, and Besent did not rule out a recession in Sunday’s interview.
“You know there are no guarantees, like who would have predicted Covid, right?” Besent said when asked if he could guarantee that there would be no recession.
“So I can predict that we are putting solid policies that will be durable, and there could be an adjustment,” he said, adding that the country should be weaned from the “mass spending of the government.”
Trump refused to discard a recession and acknowledged that Americans may feel a certain level of economic pain in response to their policies.
“I hate to predict things like that,” Trump said in a Fox News interview this month when he was asked if he was waiting for a recession this year. “There is a transition period, because what we are doing is very large.”
The president has also said several times that the economy could see some level of “disturbance” in response to its tariff policies.
“The tariffs are about making the United States back to rich and making the United States be great again, and is happening, and it will happen quite fast,” he said during his joint speech to Congress this month. “There will be some disturbance, but we agree with that. It will not be much.”
Later he repeated the feeling, telling NBC News that “there could be some disturbance, a little disturbance.”
Later, Trump seemed to go back his recession comments, saying last week that he did not “see it at all,” when he was asked again if there could be a recession. Stock market rates have been repeatedly dropped after Trump has threatened or promulgated tariffs, but Trump said last week that the sale of the stock market did not worry him, and pointed out that it was “very optimistic about the country.”
Besent on Sunday urged Americans to see how countries react in the two months after the start of reciprocal tariffs in April.
“Or tariff barriers decrease, the United States can export more. Commerce is more fair. It has always been free, but not fair,” Besent said. “Or if they don’t, we will receive substantial income.”
Besent also approached the cuts to the IRS after the Trump administration initiated a reduction in the large -scale federal workforce, including generalized cuts of test employees.
The Treasury Secretary said that the IRS had approximately 15,000 test employees that could have been fired, but “we kept around 7,500, 8,500 because we saw them as essential for the mission.” At the end of last week, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restored thousands of trial workers shot.
