Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during a Breitbart policy event on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve is suffering not from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but from “Tariff Derangement Syndrome.”
Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle asked Bessent if he expects the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, to lower interest rates.
“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, explaining that many members of the Fed were “wrong on ‘tariff inflation.’”
President Donald Trump has called for the Fed to lower interest rates, believing it would help boost the economy and lower the cost of interest on the debt.
Bessent explained that June economic data showed a “statistically insignificant” increase in prices, which led many to claim that America is starting to experience more inflation because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. He described this uptick as a “rounding error.”
“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.
He remarked, “We’ve gone from Trump Derangement Syndrome to Tariff Derangement Syndrome.”
He continued, “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.”
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.
Carney said that the Fed, instead of relying on data, which has not shown inflation, has instead relied on models that projected inflation would come from tariffs.
Bessent said at the Breitbart policy event, “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
