Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday sought to mitigate concerns about the state of the economy, after saying this weekend that “there are no guarantees” when it comes to a recession.
In an interview Tuesday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” anchor Maria Bartiromo gave Bessent a chance to address his comments from a Sunday interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker.
“The other day, you were asked a question by another outlet: Can you guarantee that we’re not going to have a recession?” Bartiromo said. “And you wanted to address that this morning.”
“Yeah. Well, look, it was a silly question. Can you guarantee there is not going to be a recession? I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee that the journalist who asked me the question that her news program is going to be on in a year,” Bessent responded.
“But, what I can guarantee you is that there is no reason we need to have a recession,” he continued.
Bessent touted the economy and knocked the media for what he described as underreporting of the economy’s strong points.
“The economy in the first quarter is doing better than the media is reporting,” Bessent said. “I think we’re seeing some very good underlying data from credit card companies, from banks. I think that the airlines, which reported some bad passenger numbers, a big amount of that is from federal employees who are not flying right now.
“So, the underlying economy is healthy,” he continued. “There is no reason we have to have a recession.”
Bessent reiterated his position that any “pause” that might occur would be from rolling back excessive spending but that, ultimately, the Trump administration is preventing what “would have been … a financial crisis.”
“Could we have a pause as we go from this incredible level of government spending, which is just unsustainable? You know, I said on the show, what I could guarantee was, if we kept going the way we were, we would have been in a financial crisis, and President Trump has put the brakes on this,” Bessent said. “We are going to get this spending under control. We are going to bring manufacturing back home, and we are going to make the country more affordable for working Americans.”
On Sunday, Welker asked Bessent if he could “guarantee the American people here and now that there will be no recession on President Trump’s watch.”
Bessent responded that “you know that … there are no guarantees, like, who — who would’ve predicted COVID?”
“So, I — I can predict that we’re putting in robust policies that will be durable,” Bessent added later. “And could there be an adjustment? Because I tell you that this massive government spending that we’d had, that if that had kept going, we have to wean our country off of that.”
