On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the U.S. doesn’t want a total decoupling from China, just a decoupling on “strategic industries” and “we have shared interests that this isn’t sustainable,” and China “can have at it” for mass production of things like clothes and sneakers.
Bessent began by saying that “we have shared interests that this isn’t sustainable, as I said before, especially on the Chinese side. And 145%, 125% is the equivalent of an embargo. We don’t want to decouple. What we want is fair trade.”
Later, he added, “I think a lot of American businesses have pre-positioned a lot of inventory, the trade deficit actually jumped because so many people bought in advance, and the companies that I’ve talked to have done that. So, we are going to stick to our guns, but, again, the U.S. and China have shared interests. They are the deficit country, though, they sell us about four times more than we sell them. So, it would be felt harder in China. But we don’t want a decoupling.”
Bessent elaborated, “[W]e don’t want to decouple over textiles and things like that. What we do want to decouple over is…we want to decouple over strategic industries. And, as I said before, the only good thing about COVID was it was a beta test if we were ever cut off from these strategic industries. And President Trump has told the entire trade team, this cannot happen again. So, whether it’s steel, semiconductors, medicines, things like that, we are going to build it here. So, we are going to bring back strategic manufacturing, we’re going to bring back precision manufacturing.”
He added that clothing and sneakers “don’t affect our national security. And there are things that we can make here in those categories, very high-end things. But, in terms of mass production, then they can have at it.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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