Bessent spoke with Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle as the Fed announced that it will keep interest rates at the same level. President Donald Trump has urged the Fed to lower interest rates to boost the economy and make it easier to pay off the debt.
“I’m not expecting a rate cut today; the market is pricing in rate cuts, and what I’m hoping that we can see out of the leadership of the Federal Reserve is a little bit of imagination,” Bessent said during the Breitbart policy event.
He then remarked that many members of the Fed were “wrong on ‘tariff inflation.’”
The Treasury Secretary said that June economic data revealed a “statistically insignificant” increase in prices, though many had claimed that the country would experience more inflation from Trump’s tariffs.
“By the way, the dollar depreciated ten percent. A normal economist would say perhaps that ten basis points might have been from dollar depreciation rather than” tariffs, Bessent said.
He added, “We’ve gone from Trump Derangement Syndrome to Tariff Derangement Syndrome.”
Breitbart News reported:
Breitbart News economics editor John Carney has long reported on how the Fed has misread the president’s tariff policies, believing they would lead to inflation.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said that the Fed would have lowered interest rates had it not been for the alleged incoming price hikes he believed would come from tariffs.
“That was a long way of saying I’ve admired Alan Greenspan in the ’90s. I thought he was a fantastic Federal Reserve chair, through the ’80s, through the ’90s, because he always had an open mind,” Bessent continued.
Bessent said, “The lack of open-mindedness has frozen the Fed and I am hoping that they would have a more open mind.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3
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