MNI BRIEF: Intl Economic System Unsustainable- US's Bessent
MNI (WASHINGTON) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday the international economic system is unsustainable and President Trump is working to reorder the system to advance the interests of the American people.
"This is not just a security issue. The United States also provides reserve assets, serves as a consumer of first and last resort, and absorbs excess supply in the face of insufficient demand in other country’s domestic models," he said in prepared remarks. "This system is not sustainable."
"Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security," Bessent said in a wide-ranging speech at the Economic Club of New York. "The administration's identifying bad actors across a range of criteria – not just tariffs applied to our exports, but non-tariffs barriers, laws which unfairly apply fines to our exporters, government policies which undercut global competition and suppress wages, and currency manipulation that enables persistent trade surpluses," he added.
The Treasury secretary said he plans use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets to drive change in the regulatory environment. "To be clear, this does not mean consolidation of agencies, but coordination via Treasury, such that our regulators work in parallel with each other and industry," he said.
Bessent added he will pursue reform of the enhanced supplementary leverage ratio, to prevent the ratio from acting as a binding constraint on banks' balance sheets and improve Treasury market intermediation.