Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were a “one-time price adjustment.”
Bessent said, “I don’t think it’s a radical change. It’s just a much needed course adjustment. And when we go back and look at what’s happened, there’s a new paper out called the China Shock and it talks about what happened post 2004, that some of the communities recovered, but the workers never recovered and that it was much more devastating on a human level. And what we are trying to do is make free trade fair trade, because the trading systems have become incredibly imbalanced.”
He continued, “You see it with these gigantic the trade deficits that we run. you see it with the big surpluses that other countries are accumulating. So we’re going. through we’re looking at tariff barriers. non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, government subsidies. and in the EU some of these gigantic fines that they’re putting on our tech companies, just because they see a big pool of capital, wwe’re going to push back on those. At the end of the day President Trump has been saying that tariff is his favorite word, I think reciprocal may be his second favorite word. We’re going to put this at the feet of our trading partners. On April 2nd we’re going to come out talk about who, who, who’s a good actor, who’s a bad actor, to what degree they have put they put up barriers against us. And it will be a choice. either the they can drop the all the market manipulation and things like that, that they’ve done that have hurt American workers. And if they do that, then we could have more frictionless trade. Or we’ll put up the tariff wall, we’ll collect a lot of money, and we will make the system fairer.”
Bessent added, “The tariffs are one time price adjustment.”
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