Pod Insights The Tucker Carlson Show Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Breaks Down Trump's Tariff Plan and Its Impact on the Middle Class About this episode Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explains the administration’s new tariffs, and why we had to do something to stop the slide.
(00:00) Trump’s Tariff Plan
(05:42) The Current State of the Stock Market
(08:22) Will Americans See Substantial Tax Cuts Because of Tariffs?
(13:16) How Much Money Will America Make Through Tariffs?
(14:33) Bringing Manufacturing Back to the US
(24:14) Tariff Pushback From Foreign Countries
(29:42) How Will Europe Be Impacted?
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Transcript 10,154 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:29 Tucker Carlson? Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for joining us. So we're at the Treasury Department. The President had a press conference yesterday next door in which he announced a whole new tariff regime global. He'd been promising to do this, well, for 40 years, really. It came not out of nowhere, but it was clearly his intent all along, as stated, but it did rattle people, including some of his supporters. So I just wanted to ask you, big picture, where do you think this leads?
0:57 Speaker 02 Well, Tucker, and thank you for having me. And as you said, the President's been talking about this for four decades. And this is transformational for the American economy, for the American worker, and for the new Republican alignment. And it's a combination of the old and new ideas. Some of the old ideas were put away. You know, I always tell everyone, and they don't want to hear it, the original tariff man was Alexander Hamilton. And he used tariffs to fund the new nation and to protect American industry. President Trump has added a third leg to the stool, and he uses tariffs to negotiate.
1:38 Speaker 02 But I think this is not unlike, I was a freshman in college when Ronald Reagan came in in 1980, and, you know, new day in America. And when I talk to people now, and they look back and they look at the Reagan years so fondly, I remember what it was like. And it was choppy.
1:58 Tucker Carlson? Very choppy.
2:00 Speaker 02 Very choppy. President 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 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...
2:27 Speaker 02 President Reagan won reelection with forty-nine states. And I think they may have even let Mondale win Minnesota, just so it wasn't a skunk.
2:35 Tucker Carlson? Just to be nice, yeah.
2:37 Speaker 02 And that's what President Trump is doing now. 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. It's just coming out now. And it's what you know, it's what I know. But finally academics are saying, oh, the, gosh, the American workers never recovered from the China Shock. What a surprise. And President Trump sensed it forty years ago.
3:16 Speaker 02 But out on the campaign trail, starting in 2015, up until last year, he has promised the American workers that the old standard of living can come back. And because what we've seen over the past at least twenty years since the China Shock, but more like the past thirty, are these massive distributional problems where the coast have done great.
3:42 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
3:43 Speaker 02 And the middle of the country has, they have just seen quality of their 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. And President Trump cares, this administration cares. And this is the first step towards realigning that a lot of our trading partners, including some of our allies, have not been good partners. If tariffs are so bad, why do they have them?
4:13 Tucker Carlson? Great question.
4:14 Speaker 02 Why do they have them? Right? Or if the American consumer is going to pay all the tariff, then why do they care about tariffs?
4:21 Tucker Carlson? Right.
4:22 Speaker 02 Because they're going to eat them. So I think that this is the beginning of a process. We're going to reindustrialize, that we have gone to a highly financialized economy.
4:36 Speaker 02 We have, we have stopped making things, especially a lot of things that are relevant for national security. I think one of the few good outcomes from COVID was we had a beta test for what maybe a kinetic war with a large adversary could look like. And it turned out that these highly efficient supply chains were not strategically secure. So that we don't make our own medicines, that we don't make our own semiconductors, that we don't make our own ships anymore. So I think that if I were to say, was there any good outcome from COVID?
5:20 Speaker 02 It was, it woke the world up to these supply chain problems. So economic security is national security. President Trump and I have talked about that a lot. So this is a national security issue that we're seeing here, but it's also an economic security issue. And it's to, I don't want to say redistribute, but it is to give working Americans real wage gains and enhance their lives. And I, I've said out on the campaign trail, one of my most frequent mottos was Wall Street's done, done great.
6:03 Speaker 02 It can continue doing well, but it's Main Street's turn. It's Main Street's turn. And that's what we saw yesterday. It's Main Street's turn.
6:13 Tucker Carlson? So, um, over the course of my life, 55 years, Wall Street really has been the commonly recognized measure of economic health. Like, how's the Dow doing? We've got entire TV channels devoted to tracking its progress, which has mostly been up during the course of my life. So if the, you know, the average of, you know, the equity averages fall, if the stock market falls. That seen by a lot of people is like a measure that the economy itself is is in decline. Do you think that's a fair measure?
6:40 Speaker 02 The market goes up and down. Warren Buffett has this saying, in the short run, the market's a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine. And in the long run, it's going to weigh, do we have good policies?
6:55 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
6:55 Speaker 02 And I, in my former business, I commented on market structure, market ups and downs a lot. I'm trying not to do that.
7:06 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
7:06 Speaker 02 But for everyone who thinks that this, these market declines are all based on the president's economic policies, I can tell you that this market decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of DeepSeek.
7:21 Tucker Carlson? Right.
7:22 Speaker 02 So the so-called Mag7, the tech stocks, have been doing very well for about 18 months, led the market. And I think that there's kind of a real dose of reality in what was going on in AI. And I think US is going to remain the leader in AI. But the AI-related stocks started coming down. So like if I were to analyze in my old hat, and this is the only time I'm going to talk about it, my old hat, what's happening with the market, I'd say it's more a Mag7 problem and not a Maga problem.
7:58 Tucker Carlson? Right. So it's a deeper, so actually the markets are, you're saying, in this specific case, with tech stocks, are taking like a real measure, the value of companies relative to foreign companies?
8:10 Speaker 02 Well, it's that. But if we look, the equal weighted S and P, even after today's moves, down 4% in the year. Or, you know, in a long-term chart, you wouldn't even notice that.
8:21 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
8:22 Speaker 02 And I think the most important thing that we can do, that I can do as a Treasury Secretary, that President Trump wants to do, is put in sound fundamentals for the underlying economy. And if the underlying economy is good, if taxes are stable, if businesses have predictability, if we have cheap and plentiful energy, if we deregulate, if we treat our workforce well, then we're going to have a great stock market.
8:49 Tucker Carlson? Fair.
8:52 Tucker Carlson? The president suggested in describing his plan for tariffs, he said, "Look, you could conceivably fund a lot of government with tariffs." And that would suggest that taxpayers fund less of the burden. And so do you expect that these will be accompanied by a congressionally-approved tax cut for the middle class?
9:14 Speaker 02 Todd, I just want to go back for a moment, too. That one of the things that the tariffs are doing is we are pushing back against other economic systems. So the Chinese have a very different economic system. They have low costs. Some would call it literally slave labor. They subsidize industry with subsidized loans. They have a lot of non-tariff barriers. Your show can't be shown there.
9:43 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
9:44 Speaker 02 So we're pushing back against that. And with the tariff income, it can be substantial. And if we think like a classical model of tariff income would say if there's a 10% tariff, then the currency would appreciate about 40% of that, so 4% of it. Then the producer in the other country would eat about 4%. And then the US consumer might have a one-time price adjustment of 2%. So in a 10% tariff, maybe the consumer pays 2% of it.
10:26 Speaker 02 We saw there's a study out recently from a group at MIT that shows that with President Trump's first China tariffs, which were approximately 20%, the price level went up 0.7%. So to answer your question, if we could put on a 20% tariff...
10:45 Speaker 02 And have the foreigners pay that and use that money to bring down our government deficit and keep taxes low here? That's a very unique formula that hasn't been tried in this country for a long time.
10:59 Tucker Carlson? And do you think, but it would require congressional participation to get there, to move tax rates, of course, are set by the Congress, so.
11:05 Speaker 02 Well, what we're gonna have now, we are in this very odd, what I would call a betwixt and between, between the tariff income and what Doge is doing in terms of the cutting government expenses. So CBO scoring, and for 35 years, I was on the other side of the wall, and I would always go, oh, well, CBO says this. And I didn't really realize that kind of CBO scoring is a lot like Enron accounting, that it's not real. And when you actually look at the real.
11:38 Tucker Carlson? But you assumed it was, on the outside?
11:40 Speaker 02 Sure. Well, they're experts.
11:42 Tucker Carlson? It's a congressional budget office.
11:44 Speaker 02 It's a congressional budget, budget office. And they're well-intentioned people, they just have the nonsensical rules. Like, think about this, when, when all the scoring's done over a 10-year window.
11:57 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
11:58 Speaker 02 So they just assume 1.7 or 1.8% economic growth over the 10 years, and that never moves. Whether you raise taxes or cut taxes, doesn't move. So that's what, like during, during the campaign, when Vice President Harris was announcing all these big tax increases she wanted to do and things like that, that the CBO was scoring her very well, and President Trump wants to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent. That was a kind of a blowout number, because obviously growth's gonna go up a lot when you cut taxes. So, that was a long way of saying.
12:43 Speaker 02 We will not get credit for the tariffs in any bill because Congress is not going to legislate it. President's doing it with executive authority, but the money will be coming in. We've already taken in several hundred million dollars on the China tariffs from his first term. We've taken in about thirty-five billion a year just on the old tariffs, not on the new ones. So in the CBO window, that's about three hundred and fifty billion dollars, which pays for a lot of the president's promises on no tax on tips, no tax on social security,
13:24 Speaker 02 no tax on overtime, making interest deductibility on autos made in the US. And think what the president's doing here. He is backing into an affordability solution for the bottom fifty percent of white earners, because they're the ones who will benefit from all four of those programs.
13:46 Tucker Carlson? So looking at, say, a year from now, so next, beginning of next April, do you have any sense of how much the US government anticipates bringing in from the tariffs announced yesterday?
13:56 Speaker 02 It's going to be a moving target, but could it be anywhere from three hundred billion to six hundred billion a year?
14:05 Tucker Carlson? Sure. Okay, so that's meaningful revenue.
14:09 Speaker 02 Very meaningful. But what will happen with tariffs over time, the ultimate goal of the tariffs, and the president says it all the time, bring your factory here. That's the best solution toward getting away from a tariff wall. So move your factory from China, from Mexico, from Vietnam, bring it here. So what will happen over time? We'll have substantial tariff income in the beginning. Manufacturers will build their factory here. The tariffs will drop, but the revenue from the factories, they have from income taxes, from all the new jobs will go up.
14:52 Speaker 02 So we'll be taking it in domestically as the tariffs drop. And why are the tariffs dropping? Because we're making it here and our trade deficit is dropping.
15:03 Tucker Carlson? So you've obviously thought this through. You think that the United States has the necessary labor force for this transition?
15:12 Speaker 02 I think we do. I think with AI, with automation, with so many of these factories are going to be new, they're going to be smart factories that I think we've got all the labor force we need. And what we are doing on the other side, one of the reasons, other than my support for President Trump, that I came out from behind my desk, and I had a pretty good life, and I wanted to come out and really tell people that I was worried about an impending financial calamity, given the high levels of government spending that were leading to high levels of government debt.
15:55 Speaker 02 So what we are doing, on one side, the president is reordering trade. On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side, that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing, and we're going to relever the private sector. So the private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years. And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and
16:33 Speaker 02 Unleash the private sector again because it's been hemmed down by excessive regulation and it's been crowded out by the government.
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19:29 Tucker Carlson? Do you ever think since your job is to, part of your job is to forecast like the effects of these policies, that you have, um, we've got probably one out of six people in this country is here illegally, maybe 50 million illegal aliens and the president said he wants to deport them. Then you have AI and the projections there are massive labor market disruption. Fewer people needed, you alluded to that a minute ago. Then you have the tariffs and like we can guess is their effect, but we don't really know because you've never done it. And then you have the reaction from the rest of the world to those tariffs. Like there's so many huge factors that are effectively unknown, that are black boxes. Really, do you ever think like, wow, you know, it's kind of hard to know what's going to happen?
20:11 Speaker 02 Look, I, it is and I always think that you can never be 100% sure, but you can stay within side of guardrails and keep moving forward. I can't remember, one of, one of the Sunday morning shows I was on a couple of weeks ago, the commentator asked me, you know, she said, can you guarantee me there won't be a recession? And I said, I can't guarantee you anything. Look, there's nothing that tells me there should be one. So I believe that this is going to work, just like President Reagan believed that supply side economics was going to work. And, but what, what I do know that
20:56 Speaker 02 The old system wasn't working.
20:57 Tucker Carlson? I think that's right.
20:58 Speaker 02 And if you look at a system that's not working, you gotta be brave to change it. So what wasn't working? Would have been really fun for me to come in and just keep issuing a lot of debt. And it's almost like a bodybuilder is taking steroids. Outside looks great. You're muscular. Inside, you're killing your vital organs. That's what was going on here. But it would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs. There was no controversy when we're doing all that. And they, but you were going to end up in a calamity.
21:38 Speaker 02 If you go back and look, you look at the financial crisis in 07, 08. Economy looked great right up until then. You go back and you look at the end of the dot com bubble and then the whole credit problem, the fraud at WorldCom, Enron, some other companies. Economy looked great until it didn't. And I think one of the things that we won't get credit for, but that this administration will have done is avoiding a financial calamity. Think about it, that they've done an analysis that one of the reasons 9/11 happened,
22:21 Speaker 02 because the airlines didn't want to pay for reinforced doors.
22:25 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
22:25 Speaker 02 They kept pushing back. FAA didn't push hard enough. And now, you know, we've got the reinforced doors. So I look at it, we're putting on the reinforced doors before the crash.
22:38 Tucker Carlson? What's the scramble, the lobbying scramble by foreign governments going to be like over the next three months? Because the president said yesterday, you know, we're putting a universal tariff, you know, one standard, but then of course each country's adjusted according to a lot of different factors, trade deficit, currency manipulation, regulation, and then tariffs. But, you know, this is all, as you said, a moving picture. It's a developing situation. So like, if I'm, pick a country, you know, Vietnam.
23:04 Tucker Carlson? China, I mean, I'm gonna really try to bring pressure to bear on this administration to adjust those numbers. Like, what's that gonna be like?
23:11 Speaker 02 It's gonna be the president's decision, and I think his view is, this has been going on for a long time, for friends and foes, and we're gonna see where this plays out. I think what's gonna be more important than the discussion with countries is the discussion with companies. So, what do companies want to do? As President Trump said yesterday, best way to get around the tariffs, build your factory here.
23:39 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
23:40 Speaker 02 And what can we do here at Treasury to help that? We're pushing to get the tax bill done, so we can guarantee the low taxes, full depreciation within the first year. We're working with Secretary Bergman and Wright on energy security, and we're working on getting the regulations down. The president, I don't know whether he talked about it yesterday or the day before, Taiwan Semi, or just semiconductor manufacturer in the world, Lee Zeldin, the EPA Commissioner, is working to push through all the permits that they need, because we've just gone into this regulatory morass, where it takes so long to get things
24:24 Speaker 02 done in this country. So, I think what will be more interesting are the individual company announcements, more than the country announcements.
24:35 Tucker Carlson? You wanna sell to Americans, you gotta make it in America.
24:37 Speaker 02 Sure, or pay the tariff.
24:40 Tucker Carlson? So, how is China as a nation going to, I mean, this is such a big challenge, it's directly in their face, it's about every country on the globe, but it's really, most, more than any other country, about China, I think it's fair to say. How are they gonna respond? What's their retaliation look like?
24:54 Speaker 02 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, and when you look at the history, we are the debtor nation.
25:07 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
25:09 Speaker 02 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 of the modern world. We've never seen anything like this in terms of their export level relative to their GDP, relative to their population. So I think it is going to be very difficult for them to try to change the model. They're trying, 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. But I think that, you know,
25:51 Speaker 02 when you think the Chinese manufacturing system is like that old Disney movie with the brooms carrying the buckets.
25:56 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
25:57 Speaker 02 There, there's nothing you can do, like, that's their business model. It's not gonna stop. Now, what could happen, if you were to say, Scott, what's, what's the dream scenario? That somehow there could be a deal where the US and China, we want more manufacturing, which would mean a smaller part of the economy's consumption. The Chinese have this imbalanced economy with too much manufacturing, and actually the Chinese consumers really, they get the short end of the stick. So Chinese households, you know, they're called in what's
26:36 Speaker 02 called the middle, middle income trap, that could we do something together to say, okay, you rebalance, you consume more, manufacture less, we are going to consume less and manufacture more, and we'll be military rivals, there'll still be an economic rivalry, but we're gonna level the playing field by a lot. Now, that's not gonna happen tomorrow, that's not gonna happen in a month, but over the next few years, they may have to come around because I think their business model is broken. I think President Trump's broken their business model with these tariffs.
27:18 Tucker Carlson? So you're describing, you know, the famous scenario where if you take, take a bank loan, the bank is in charge, they can repossess whatever they borrowed against, you borrowed against. But if you take a big enough loan, you're kind of in charge of the bank.
27:29 Speaker 02 Exactly. And they, they've just got such a big deficit with us, that...
27:35 Tucker Carlson? They need our markets.
27:37 Speaker 02 They can't survive without.
27:39 Tucker Carlson? Are you confident that there's like a clear enough channel of communication between the two governments that the details can be worked out and that nothing will go crazy in the meantime?
27:48 Speaker 02 Well, I think what gives me a lot of confidence is the relationship between President Trump and Chairman Xi.
27:55 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
27:56 Speaker 02 That when you have a direct line of communication at the very top, then I think it's very difficult for things to go haywire.
28:04 Tucker Carlson? Interesting. What about the rest of the world? What about Europe?
28:08 Speaker 02 Look, the Europeans, we look back and there was the famous meeting where President Trump told the Europeans, "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...
28:31 Tucker Carlson? We blew it up.
28:32 Speaker 02 Somebody did.
28:33 Tucker Carlson? Somebody did. Probably Putin!
28:36 Speaker 02 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.
29:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
29:05 Speaker 02 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's becoming their competitor.
29:16 Tucker Carlson? So you said at the outset, the first example of the analogy that you used was President Reagan's first term, obviously big win in 80, recession of 82, wipeout, and then like the biggest landslide in history in 84. So you're suggesting by saying that, that the fruits were obvious within the first term, within four years?
29:40 Speaker 02 They were. Only difference now is there was a lot of competition back then, but there's a level of civility.
29:48 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
29:49 Speaker 02 And the real danger here, if there were a midterm loss, and I don't think there has to be... You know what's gonna happen. I know what's gonna happen. Democratic House is gonna go immediately to impeachment for something.
30:01 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
30:01 Speaker 02 Like, the lawfare is gonna start again.
30:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
30:05 Speaker 02 And I think the American people are gonna hate it again. So Einstein's definition of insanity, doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome.
30:13 Tucker Carlson? But do you think that, and this is really aimed at the people who support President Trump and who agree with you wholeheartedly, that the current system was really bad? And like, drive across the country, you'll see how bad it has been. Horrible. It lowered life expectancy. But the people who are hoping that yesterday's move will lead to a demonstrably brighter future within four years, is it your sincere prediction that within four years will say, "Actually, that kinda worked"?
30:42 Speaker 02 I believe that it's going to work. And I know that what we were doing wasn't working.
30:49 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
30:49 Speaker 02 So I think we have to try this. And I have a high confidence ratio it's going to work. And I have a very high confidence ratio. The good news is, we have President Trump's previous term, when everyone said, "None of this was gonna work." "Oh, the China terrorists are gonna do this. They're gonna cause inflation." They didn't. This is going to happen to working class... It's gonna be bad for working-class Americans. Well, guess what? Working-class Americans, the hourly workers did better than supervisory workers. The bottom 50% of households, their net worth increased faster than the top 10% of households.
31:31 Speaker 02 And I'm not happy with what's going on in the market today. But the distribution of equities across households, the top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities. 88% of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12% of the stock market. The bottom 50 has debt.
31:55 Speaker 02 They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we've got to give them some relief. That I was struck by the statistic from last year.
32:06 Tucker Carlson? That's the message right there. Just as a bystander, I'm like, wow, okay.
32:09 Speaker 02 All right, or that I like the examples, and I was really struck by two different statistics last year. Summer of 2024, Americans took more European vacations than they had in history. Summer of 2024, more Americans were using food banks than they ever have in history. I went into two food banks that near my hometown to ask, what's the story? And they said, you know, it really takes, for a lot of people, it's a loss of dignity to walk in a food bank.
32:47 Tucker Carlson? Worse.
32:47 Speaker 02 And but they were seeing something, a new phenomenon, that it wasn't their traditional clientele, wasn't people who'd lost their homes, it wasn't people out on the street. These were working families who could no longer, you know, a hundred dollars at the grocery store, that basket of groceries every week. They were missing five, six, seven things, and they were coming to the food bank to top up. So that's not a great America. Record European vacation, record food banks. And no reason we can't keep the record European vacations going, but we gotta take care of these other people. But and you know what? That they don't want handouts.
33:32 Speaker 02 The Democrats had this strategy called compensate the loser. So first of all, the name of that strategy, I don't think the bottom 50% of Americans are losers. I think the system hasn't worked for them. I think that they are winners. It's just a bad system. So we are going to fix the system. And look, they want good jobs. They want their kids to do better than they do. They want to own a home. They want to pay down their debt. That this isn't hard. And I think that we can do this in the next four years.
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35:37 Speaker 00 LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.
36:17 Speaker 05 I'm not ready for this.
36:18 Tucker Carlson? He's back.
36:19 Speaker 05 I'm older, I'm wiser.
36:23 Tucker Carlson? And sharper than ever.
36:24 Speaker 05 Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.
36:32 Tucker Carlson? Dexter Resurrection, new season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.
36:38 Tucker Carlson? You grew up in a middle-class, working-class background? You were very successful, lived in rich-person world for a long time. While this was all going on, and I just have to ask you candidly, were you ever at dinner with people who were like, "Wow, you know, we're doing great"? I live in a rich-person world too, I'm not criticizing you at all, but like, did anyone at dinner ever say, "Wow, you know, I just tried to drive somewhere for 100 miles, and this country doesn't look good, like, people are not thriving"? Was there any sense of that among the people you knew?
37:06 Speaker 02 No, they were more, "My jet was an hour late." I had the worst day. My jet was an hour late. You can't believe, "Oh my god, I'm gonna switch charter companies." So that's... And look, Tucker, that I'm especially attuned to what I think's going on with the United States, because, you know, I will tell you, my family was very affluent. Early settlers, we were very affluent. They had for about 250 years. My dad made a lot of bad financial choices. So when I was born, first six, seven, eight years, we were affluent. He lost everything. And, um, so I've seen what that's like. I've seen both sides.
37:46 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
37:47 Speaker 02 That I was fortunate enough to be able to make it back. And that, you know, I know what economic insecurity is like. And I don't think people should have to have that. Or, if you wanna work hard. And people wanna work hard. You were out on the campaign trail with President Trump. I was out on the campaign trail. And I gotta say, one of the most... So I went for the final...
38:16 Speaker 02 Two stops in Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Pittsburgh in the Duquesne Arena, walk in and there are the the union workers, steel workers, they got on their hats, they got on their vests, they're with their children. And it's very moving, like they just want a better life. They want their communities to be sound, they want their kids to do better, they want the Little League baseball, they like, they don't care what's going on in Madison Avenue, they don't know what the hot new restaurant is in Paris. And that President Trump somehow has assembled this incredible coalition of Elon Musk, the
38:59 Speaker 02 richest man in the world, and those folks who were in the Rose Garden yesterday, and those people I saw at the Duquesne Arena, and I think it's unbelievable.
39:07 Tucker Carlson? Interesting. Um, what do you worry about as Treasury Secretary? Obviously, probably like lying about it, I'm thinking about all the things that go wrong with the US economy. What are your, if you could be honest, like, what are your biggest worries?
39:23 Speaker 02 That, so to the extent that in my business career, I I had a strong point, I think it was risk management. So I I do myself two things, the United States leading bond salesman.
39:36 Tucker Carlson? Yep.
39:37 Speaker 02 And I think that with what's going on, I'm gonna have a better and better story to tell as we're getting our economic house and our fiscal house in order. And then I try to imagine what could go very wrong. What, what would we do if there were another outbreak similar to COVID? You can't worry about things like that, but I I worry about a kinetic war somewhere. What would we do in in the event of something that happened? And what I try to do is create the situation where I can worry a little less every day.
40:21 Speaker 02 So I'll tell you, I came in, I was confirmed on January 28th, and during the month of January, 10-year interest rates, which is probably the most important rate in the country, mortgages are based on that. Business and capital formation is based on that. I came in and that had almost spiked to 5%. And I think 5% can be an uncomfortable area for the economy, for Treasury who has to issue a lot of bonds. And now that I've gotten in, I worry a little less. But I still worry, we've got a tremendous amount of debt to roll.
41:02 Speaker 02 And I worry that we aren't going to do the smart cuts and the focus on waste, fraud, and abuse. I worry that that gets sidelined. And then on the other side, I worry that the tax bill somehow gets bogged down. We could have the largest tax increase in history. Or, you know, I worry that the normal geopolitical things, whether it's Iran, Taiwan,
41:35 Speaker 02 that something goes haywire between Russia and Ukraine.
41:41 Tucker Carlson? So you began your job description by saying you're a bond salesman. You're selling America's debt to the world.
41:47 Speaker 02 Yep.
41:47 Tucker Carlson? And I know that was like a big part of the portfolio as the transition was envisioning it, like who can make the case for American bonds to the world?
41:56 Tucker Carlson? How are your case? Are you confident you can do that? And how is your pitch changing after yesterday?
42:04 Speaker 02 Well, as I said, right now, we're in this strange, betwixt and between because we are going to take in substantial tariff revenue. And what Doge is doing is substantially cutting expenses. But we're not getting credit for it right now. But I think market's starting to get ahead of it. So the 10-year bond, having almost peaked at 5, is now through 4. Way to think about it is every hundred, every basis point's about a billion dollars in savings. So we've saved $100 billion.
42:46 Speaker 02 And that's probably not going to happen that quickly again. But I, I think that we are setting the sails for a much better fiscal time. And people don't have to say the, the US is out of control. The US is going to default. But we're not. And I, I think every day, my case gets better. And like if we were to just imagine a very reductionist formula for government. So G equals S minus T, spending minus taxes.
43:27 Tucker Carlson? Right.
43:28 Speaker 02 That for spending, our side, the Republicans likes to, we like to spend, but less than the Democrats, but both sides like to spend. And then minus T, Democrats like higher taxes. We like lower taxes. What if the S actually went down? And I think to me, that's the exciting part, that that's been unthinkable in everybody's calculation.
43:56 Tucker Carlson? No one's even really seriously raised it, including Ronald Reagan, by the way.
43:59 Speaker 02 Yeah. And look, I, I, I think President Reagan had a different agenda, that he ramped up defense spending and remember, oh, he's crazy. It's this, it's going to break the budget. Star Wars is crazy. He's a madman. And then the Iron Curtain went down. And we were able to, so it's actually a Soviet term. And he used the Soviet strategy on this, on themselves, on the Russians escalate to de-escalate.
44:28 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
44:29 Speaker 02 So we escalated military spending. They tried to keep up and then they collapsed. So, um, again, everything's easy in hindsight. But I think here, what we're doing in terms of bringing down these credible levels of spending. But more, more importantly, I tell anyone who'll listen, I said, remember, DOGE is the Office of Government Efficiency, not elimination, not extinction. So what if we can actually do a better job? With what with less seems inconceivable, but when I when I see what's going on in a lot
45:11 Speaker 02 of these government agencies, it's unbelievable. And like if you think I I've lived in Manhattan, I've lived in Florida, roughly state of New York, state of Florida have the same number of people. Actually, Florida has few more now. So New York budget is about 235 billion. Florida budget's 125 billion. How do they do that? Oh, oh, yeah. And there's no income tax in Florida. Oh, yeah. And the roads are better. And you go and get your driver's license, and it takes 15 minutes, not five hours. So I think can we make the rest of America
45:53 Speaker 02 look more like Florida and less like New York? Or one day is New York going to look more like Florida?
46:00 Tucker Carlson? So do you think after four years, we will see an actual net reduction in government spending thanks to Doge?
46:06 Speaker 02 Inflation adjusted, yes.
46:09 Tucker Carlson? How long do you think Elon's in for?
46:13 Speaker 02 I I think that Elon, that day to day, I don't know. But I think his imprint is going to be with us a long time. And I think that the mainstream media has tried to demonize Doge and all the folks who work with him. And I tell you, we have a couple of Treasury, a couple of IRS, their Treasury employees who I hired, I interviewed. And I'll tell you, there's this one fellow, Tom Kraus, he was on TV with Bret Baer the other night. And Tom's incredible. He's done $100 billion of tech mergers. With my investment business,
46:57 Speaker 02 I would have hired him. I don't think I could have afforded him. And he is doing this for the good of his country. He came in without touching any of the payment systems that the mistruths that were spread by the Washington Post, he has analyzed the system, and within six weeks, what pointed at all the vulnerabilities. There's a young man named Sam Kirkos, who was on Laura Ingraham with me the other night. And that was my idea. It's like, let's bring him out of the shadows, and let's Make this demonization stop. And like this young man, other than the fact he only owns one pair of pants, which he likes
47:41 Speaker 02 telling everyone, I would, you or I would be happy if our daughter brought him home. He's a patriot, he's working hard for the country, and he's analytical. And the things that he's seen at the IRS, just in their tech systems, and that's all he does. You know, Elon has a shirt that he wears under his jacket and he'll flash it every once in a while and it says tech support. And that's what we're getting, is we've got a blockbuster style government and we should be on Netflix. We're hailing cabs and we're in an Uber economy. Why can't the government be in the gig economy? Not hard.
48:22 Tucker Carlson? So we're not positive that cryptocurrency is the future of finance, but we do know that what we have now is broken and dangerous. Debt has never been higher in this country. Many of our so-called leaders are getting rich, serving you. It's a scam. So where does it go? Well, thankfully, there are options. Donald Trump has said repeatedly, he wants the United States to be the crypto capital of the world. He's already created the Crypto Advisory Council and recently signed an executive order to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve. This could give normal people an alternative to the government's failing system and frankly to the US dollar. I'm not saying put all your money outside the US dollar, but like, don't be crazy, don't be stupid here. You can see where it's going. So the people at I Trust Capital can help you get in to this.
49:04 Tucker Carlson? It's complicated for people who aren't following it, they make it easy. They're based 100% in the United States of America, we looked into this. They service only American investors and they operate the only platform that allows you to buy and sell crypto 24/7, both inside and outside of your tax advantaged IRA. And it all happens on one easy to use dashboard. They also operate a closed loop system, meaning that bad actors can't access your account and steal your money. So if you're considering adding Bitcoin if you want to, or some other cryptocurrency or portfolio, I Trust can be trusted and it's easy to understand. Itrustcapital.com or click the link below. Can I ask you a weird question? Who runs the Federal Reserve exactly?
49:47 Tucker Carlson? I don't really, how can you have this like pivotal entity, institution that obviously has like the most direct effect on markets of any? And it does seem outside of political control. What is that?
50:03 Speaker 02 Well, look, I think that I, during my confirmation hearing, and I was actually at a dinner that Jerome Powell was at last night, at my confirmation hearing, I said, you know, I'm only going to talk about the mistakes the Federal Reserve has made in the past, I won't talk about the ones they're going to make in the future. But I think it is important for monetary policy that they are walled off, that some of the other things they do, regulation, they got into DEI, they got into climate,
50:43 Speaker 02 I actually think that that impinges on their monetary policy and makes them vulnerable. So I think that they should focus on monetary policy, doing the best that they can for the American economy, the American people, keeping inflation low. And then the rest, there are a lot of other banking agencies, too.
51:10 Tucker Carlson? So the Fed controls the weather now, too? What were they doing with climate?
51:14 Speaker 02 Well, I will tell you, there's something, the Treasury Secretary chairs something called the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and it's all the financial regulators. And I think it was two weeks before Silicon Valley Bank went under, FSOC issued a report, and guess what they said the biggest risk to the financial system was? Climate.
51:41 Tucker Carlson? Really?
51:42 Speaker 02 Not that there was a large bank in California that was having a slow motion run on its assets, and that it would cause another bank failure, then another bank failure, it was climate. So, as far as I can see, climate's been pretty good. They failed. The regulators failed. And I think that's what people are getting sick of. And it's back to my, one of my favorite phrases that President Trump uses, common sense.
52:12 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
52:13 Speaker 02 Look, it's just common sense. That the, if you have a whole bunch of deposits that could leave your bank with a click, you shouldn't have all these long-term assets. But they were too busy worrying about the weather. And there was also some degree of regulatory capture. Seems hard to believe to the average citizen. The CEO of Silicon Valley Bank was on the board of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, who was his chief regulator. They gonna tell that guy what to do?
52:46 Tucker Carlson? Why is gold moving around the world in such huge quantities right now?
52:52 Speaker 02 Well, a couple of things. It's moving, physically, it's moving because of potential tariffs here. So, like, it was unclear whether we were going to exempt gold from terrorists, which I believe we have. So there was a big move out of vaults in Switzerland, out of vaults in London, to get it into New York. And look, that, there are a lot of different stores of value over time. Bitcoin's becoming a store of value. Gold has historically been a store of value. I think what's interesting is where do we see the gold demand coming from?
53:37 Speaker 02 Huge amount is from China.
53:38 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
53:39 Speaker 02 Where, as I said, they're in the middle of an economic recession/depression. People don't trust the Chinese currency because they have capital controls. There are 1.4 billion Chinese who all want to get their money out, and they won't let them. They will let them buy gold.
54:02 Tucker Carlson? So that's the response you think, but it's just, do you find it interesting that even now, 2025, when everything is abstract and digital, that gold is still widely believed globally to be a reliable store of value?
54:16 Speaker 02 I, I think that store, gold, gold has a, a lot of history going with it.
54:23 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
54:24 Speaker 02 That a friend of mine's grandmother during, Russia had a financial crisis in 98, then they had a big inflation, and a friend of mine's grandmother went out and bought 18 bicycles and put them in her apartment, and that was her store of value.
54:38 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
54:38 Speaker 02 So.
54:38 Tucker Carlson? How'd she do on the bike investment?
54:40 Speaker 02 Great, great. I, I wish I did that well. So, but that, look, yeah, gold, gold also has other applications, a lot of applications, jewelry in India, but it's something that historically people have all agreed on, and gold does not have, gold can't have a fiscal problem. Gold cannot have a gigantic budget deficit. Gold cannot have the, a, um, a war. So just the fact that it is this isolated thing makes it very interesting, and the fact
55:22 Speaker 02 that the entire global trading system until Richard Nixon took us off was tied to gold.
55:30 Tucker Carlson? So you're not anti-gold?
55:32 Speaker 02 Oh, no, no, no, no. I, they, when, when I had my fund, I think people might have called me a gold bug.
55:39 Tucker Carlson? How'd you wind up interacting with Zelensky?
55:42 Speaker 02 President asked me to go to Kiev. Well, he, he actually asked me to lead the economic agreement that was part of his peace plan. And I, I think it's important to look at the arc of President Trump's peace plan, and he had sequenced it really well. It was, we're going to sign a deal with Ukrainians, and it'll do several things. One,
56:16 Speaker 02 It will make the US and Ukraine partners, link us closer together. Two, it will be a symbol to Russian leadership that the US isn't abandoning Ukraine. But importantly, three, it will show the American people that we have an economic stake and that we haven't just been doing these massive grants, which has been the history of USAID.
56:44 Tucker Carlson? Of course.
56:45 Speaker 02 So, Ukraine succeeds, we succeed, and it could be a long-term partnership. Now, President, I, I thought it was important to take the agreement to Kiev and present it to President Zelensky. Everyone's telling me, oh, no, have him meet you in Vienna, he's gonna be at the Munich Security Conference a few days later. I said, no. I want to go there and discuss it with him. And that's how I ended up going to Kiev. Very, very interesting going to Kiev. Flight to Poland.
57:17 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
57:18 Speaker 02 Then you get on, I don't know if you've been on it, get on this night train for 10 hours, and you arrive at Kiev at 8:30 in the morning. And for anyone who, they said, oh, the President Trump's selling out to the Russians, not selling out to the Russians, the Russians bombed Kiev four hours before I got there. They hadn't bombed since November. So, the Russians didn't like the look of this deal because it thought that the, it was actually something durable for the US people and the Ukrainian people.
57:52 Tucker Carlson? So, what happened?
57:53 Speaker 02 President Zelensky was in the mood to sign the deal that day. We had a spirited discussion, and I said to him, you've got 50 reporters out there. I am here to show that there is no daylight between the American people, the Russian people, between, excuse me, Ukrainian people, between the...
58:20 Speaker 02 American leadership and Ukrainian leadership. And I said, you've opened up daylight size of the Grand Canyon. What are we going to go out and tell those people? He said, tell them I'm going to sign the deal in Munich. I said, so you're going to sign the deal when you see Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Rubio in Munich? Yes. He didn't sign it there. There's a lot of back and forth. The following week, they're begging to come to the White House and should make him sign the deal before he comes. And then he got to the Oval Office and blew up what should have been the easiest thing to do in the world. He was supposed to show up, have a press conference, we're
59:02 Speaker 02 going to have a private lunch. If he had anything on his mind, there were going to be nine of us, nine of them in the White House dining room. He could have aired his grievances then. And there's a famous photo in the East Wing Ballroom of everything laid out on the table to be signed. And it never got signed.
59:24 Tucker Carlson? So this is an unelected president of a client state whose bureaucrats are being paid directly by American taxpayers, including their retirement accounts are funded by us.
59:32 Speaker 02 And they have the lowest retirement age in Europe. It's 60. Put it in contrast, France is 62 and Italy's 67.
59:42 Tucker Carlson? And we're paying for that. And so at a certain point, you know, you wouldn't expect a man like that in a highly precarious position, I think it's fair to say, to like assume a high-handed tone with American officials and berate them and sniff a lot and say, you know, just basically act like a crazy person. Like, how do you account for that? The arrogance? What is that?
1:00:03 Speaker 02 Look, a couple, a couple of things is he was a performer, kind of a vaudevillian. And he was an ordinary person thrown into a fraught time, rose to the occasion, was heroic, and I think is stuck. And I think under a tremendous amount of pressure, I think that some of the government officials around him and the cabinet are very good. I think some of the people around him, he's not getting the best advice, that his advisors are not
1:00:42 Speaker 02 Perfect. And I think if we go back to the agreement, I think one of the great things about the agreement is it makes sure that the money comes to the American people and the Ukrainian people. Because Tucker, let me tell you what the agreement wasn't. It wasn't one of these rapacious Chinese deals where it's sign over your mines, sign over your port, or it wasn't a loan to own. Here's a loan, you're never going to be able to pay it back, we're going to get this. It's a genuine economic partnership that they put in assets, we can put in loans from our overseas banks, we put in American know-how, and we didn't get it, we don't make any money unless they make money. And you know who doesn't like that?
1:01:27 Speaker 02 People with their hand in the till.
1:01:28 Tucker Carlson? Right.
1:01:29 Speaker 02 Because we were regulating the flow of the money.
1:01:33 Tucker Carlson? Ah.
1:01:34 Speaker 02 So I think that's part of the glitch. I am hopeful that the, that it was a bug, not a feature of the system, and that that's been fixed. We're expecting a Ukraine, Ukrainian technical team beginning of next week, and I'm hopeful we can get this thing signed and go back to a win-win situation. Because President Trump, I didn't give you the full arc of the deal, President Trump wanted to create the, this deal with the Ukrainians, then be able to go to Russian
1:02:11 Speaker 02 leadership with, and show them that we do stand with the Ukrainians, but they, on an economic basis. And then the Russians would be incentivized to come to the table also. And so that, the sequences, sequencing has been thrown off, but I think we can fix it.
1:02:37 Tucker Carlson? Are we ever going to get an audit of where all of our billions went? Where all the weapons we sent? What happened to all the cash? All the pallets of hundred-dollar bills? Like, where are they now? Why, why is it hard to get an audit of what happened to the money?
1:02:52 Speaker 02 I don't know. Tucker, in my life, I always try to look forward.
1:02:56 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:02:56 Speaker 02 And I think if this deal works, then that money could end up being small change.
1:03:04 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:03:04 Speaker 02 A good way to think about it, when the Iron Curtain came down, Ukraine and Poland's economies were roughly the same size. Poland is three and a half or four times larger now.
1:03:17 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:03:17 Speaker 02 Poland is going to have one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world, higher than some Western European countries.
1:03:24 Tucker Carlson? For sure.
1:03:25 Speaker 02 Ukraine, to your point, because of various kleptocracy aspects, has been held back.
1:03:32 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:03:33 Speaker 02 So hopefully, with US assistance and President Trump engineering this peace deal, Ukrainian people can have a better future.
1:03:46 Tucker Carlson? For a Treasury Secretary, you're a very capable diplomat, I must say, very diplomatic language. Last question, how do you, so because this is also, and you're just going back to the tariff announcement yesterday, and because it's like, it really is a total departure from what all of us have grown up with and our expectations, and however much you support it, it's new. And people are freaked out about it. How do you keep message discipline in an administration, in any administration, in this one specifically? How do you decide how you're going to explain this, who's going to explain it? How do you keep messages from contradicting one another? What is that process like?
1:04:23 Speaker 02 We all take President Trump's lead.
1:04:25 Tucker Carlson? Yeah.
1:04:26 Speaker 02 We know, we had a meeting yesterday morning, we had a meeting after the announcement in the Rose Garden before we went out doing media. And as you know, he's his own best spokesman.
1:04:39 Tucker Carlson? Yes.
1:04:39 Speaker 02 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, shouldn't be here.
1:04:55 Tucker Carlson? But you ever say like, you know, maybe this is someone who can reassure potential bond buyers, investors in markets, this person scares the crap out of markets, like, let's get the guy who reassures markets?
1:05:06 Speaker 02 Well, the one thing I will say, that no one should listen to anyone in the markets talk about the US dollar, other than President Trump or myself. We are the only ones who speak for this administration, the United States government, on dollar policy. I can tell you, we have a strong dollar policy, and we are putting in all of the necessary ingredients to make sure the dollar is strong over the long run. Can it go up and down on a Bloomberg terminal over the short run? Sure. Can individual bilateral moves happen between the dollar and the Mexican currency, the dollar and the yen? Sure, that's what I made my living doing.
1:05:51 Speaker 02 I'm glad it does it. But over time, if we put in solid economic fundamentals, and do this transformative program, then the dollar is going to do great, and the American people are going to do great.
1:06:05 Tucker Carlson? Secretary, thank you very much.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:06:08 Tucker Carlson? Appreciate it.
1:06:13 Tucker Carlson? We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.
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