Treasury Secretary Scott Bescent said on CNBC's “Scokebox” on Friday that President Donald Trump's tariffs are “one-time price adjustments.”
Bescent said, “I don't think that's a fundamental change. This is a necessary course adjustment. And when we go back and see what happened, there's a new paper called the China Shock, and what happened since 2004, some communities have recovered, but workers have not recovered, and it's much more devastating on a human level. And what we're trying to do is to have free trade fairs because the trading system is so unbalanced.”
He continued. We see it in the big surplus that other countries are accumulating. So we're going. Looking at the barriers to tariffs. Non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, government subsidies. And in the EU, some of these huge fines they put in our tech companies are WWE going to push them back just because they see a big pool of capital. At the end of the day, President Trump has said tariffs are his favorite phrase. I plan to put this at the feet of my trading partner. On April 2nd, we talk about who, who is a good actor, who is a bad actor. And that becomes a choice. Either they could manipulate all the markets and drop something like that, what they did hurt American workers. And if they do, we can make a more frictionless deal. Or set up a tariff barrier, collect large amounts of money and make the system even more fair. ”
Bessent added, “Taxes are a one-time price adjustment.”
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