{"id":15216,"date":"2025-11-03T23:20:44","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/treasurys-bessent-concedes-some-parts-of-the-economy-are-already-in-recession\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T23:20:44","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:20:44","slug":"treasurys-bessent-concedes-some-parts-of-the-economy-are-already-in-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/treasurys-bessent-concedes-some-parts-of-the-economy-are-already-in-recession\/","title":{"rendered":"Treasury\u2019s Bessent concedes some parts of the economy are already \u2018in recession\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Just seven weeks into his second term, Donald Trump was asked about the possibility of his economic agenda creating a downturn, at least in the short term. “Are you expecting a recession this year?” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked. The president responded to the question with a great many words. None of them was “no.”<\/p>\n

“I hate to predict things like that,” Trump replied<\/a>weeks after publicly conceding<\/a> that some Americans would might soon feel “some pain” from his policies.<\/p>\n

In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick added that Trump’s agenda might very well lead to a recession<\/a>though he believed it’d be “worth it” in the long run.<\/p>\n

Six months later, Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, offered some notable comments of his own on the state of the nation’s economy. Axios reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Some portions of the economy are already in a recession, and others could fall into one without more interest rate cuts, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on BLN Sunday. … Asked if the U.S. risks a recession if the Fed doesn’t keep cutting rates, Bessent told BLN’s Jake Tapper, ‘I think we are in good shape, but I think that there are sectors of the economy that are in recession.’<\/p>\n

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As is always the case, context matters: The Cabinet secretary made these comments while arguing<\/a> in support of additional interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n

The bottom line, however, remains the same: According to Trump’s treasury secretary, as the first year of the president’s second term nears its end, the U.S. economy isn’t just struggling in some areas — there are some “sectors of the economy” that are already “in recession.”<\/p>\n

This is not the White House’s official line. On the contrary, Trump pushes the opposite line on a very regular basis.<\/p>\n

“We have the best economy we’ve ever had,” the president declared<\/a> a month ago. “We had the best economy in my first term, but we have an economy that’s blowing it away.”<\/p>\n

During his Asia trip, the Republican repeated the line<\/a> several times, insisting that American eyes have never before seen an economy as strong as the current one in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Trump, not only does his treasury secretary apparently disagree, but the public also seems to know better. The latest CBS News\/YouGov poll<\/a> found that 60% of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, while 51% said his economic agenda has made them worse off. Plenty of other recent national surveys have pointed in the same direction<\/a>including a newly released CNN poll<\/a>which found 61% of the public believes the Republican’s policies have made the economy worse, not better.<\/p>\n

Or put another way, that “pain” the president warned us about in March is now being noticed by much of the country, his boasts of a “golden age<\/a>” notwithstanding.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Just seven weeks into his second term, Donald Trump was asked about the possibility of his economic agenda creating a downturn, at least in the short term. “Are you expecting a recession this year?” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked. The president responded to the question with a great many words. None of them was “no.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}