Trump administration to markets: Don't expect a rescue
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Monitors at the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If there was one consistent message from Trump administration economic officials Sunday morning, it was this: We're not worried about the stock market plunging, and the cavalry isn't coming to save you from tariffs, either.
Why it matters: Investors lost more than $6 trillion Thursday and Friday as stocks sank on President Trump's sweeping new tariff plan.
- Major investors like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman fear markets could be dire on Monday if Trump doesn't do something beforehand to ease up on the trade levies.
Yes, but: Trump's economic team made clear no one should count on any last-minute relief from the reciprocal tariffs that are set to be imposed Wednesday.
- "The tariffs are coming. He announced it and he wasn't kidding. The tariffs are coming, of course they are," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sounded the same note on NBC's "Meet the Press," when asked if Trump was open to negotiating tariffs.
- "No. No, no, no. I think that we are going to have to see the path forward. Because, you know, after 20, 30, 40, 50 years of bad behavior, you can't just wipe the slate clean," Bessent said.
Zoom out: The administration's unified stance Sunday — from Lutnick, Bessent, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett and senior trade adviser Peter Navarro — was that everyday Americans are less concerned about market fluctuations than the media.
- "Americans who want to retire right now, Americans who have put away for years in their savings accounts, I - I think they don't look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what's happening," Bessent said.
- Hassett, for his part, rejected any suggestion that the market declines were part of some greater plan to bring down stocks.
- "It is not a strategy for the markets to crash. It's a strategy to create a golden age for the American worker," he told ABC's "This Week."
The bottom line: Economists widely believe that the tariffs, if not lifted, will cause inflation to rise and growth to fall, and lead ultimately to a U.S. and global recession.
- But Lutnick, for one, looked past those impacts and framed the tariffs as the only way to restore American manufacturing as a matter of national security.
- "There is no postponing," he said. "The president needs to reset global trade."
