Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is walking back demands he made yesterday that the Federal Reserve cut rates by 50 basis points at its next policy meeting in September.
In an interview on Fox Business this morning, Bessent insisted, “I didn’t tell the Fed what to do. What I said was that to get to a neutral rate on interest, that would be an approximately 150 basis point cut. I did not call for them to get there.”
Bessent added, “The other thing that I said was that perhaps because they had bad BLS data in June and July that perhaps, perhaps, a 50 basis point cut in September was warranted.”
On Wednesday, Bessent stated in a Bloomberg Television interview that the Fed “could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis point rate cut in September.” Bessent added the Fed “should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower” than the current range of 4.25% to 4.5%.
Photo courtesy of Sec. Bessent’s social media pages
