Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said “there doesn’t have to be a recession,” and the market consistently “underestimates Donald Trump.”
“There doesn’t have to be a recession,” Bessent said on Sunday’s episode of “Meet The Press.” “Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week. What we’re looking at is building the long term economic fundamentals for prosperity that I think the previous administration had put us on a course for financial calamity.”
He said the market “underestimates Donald Trump,” as he remembers when the stock market crashed the night Trump won in 2016.
After Trump implemented tariffs on almost every country in the world, and the stock market subsequently lost more than $6 trillion in value, Trump wrote on Truth Social to “hang tough.”
“THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN,” Trump wrote Saturday. “HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.”
Bessent said right now is an “adjustment process,” and the administration is going to “hold the course.”
Analysts have predicted that a recession is coming soon, but Bessent said he doesn’t believe Trump’s tariffs are causing a possible recession.
“I think we can see from the jobs number on Friday that was well above expectations that we are moving forward,” Bessent said. “I see no reason that we have to price in a recession.”
U.S. employers added 228,000 jobs in March, up from 117,000 in February. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%, too.
When asked about Americans who want to retire now but have just watched their life savings deplete in the stock market, Bessent said “most Americans” don’t have “everything” in the market and according to him, they don’t watch the stock market day to day.
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“The reason the stock market is considered a good investment is because it’s a longterm investment,” Bessent said. “If you look day to day, week to week, it’s very risky. Over the longterm, it’s a good investment.”