← Videos · Economy, Tariffs & Trade

Secretary Bessent Takes the Tariff Case to the Economic Club of New York, Mar. 6, 2025

March 6, 2025 · U.S. Department of the Treasury · 0:36:21

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took questions from Larry Kudlow at the Economic Club of New York on March 6, 2025, following his own opening speech at the event — the Treasury Department posted the session to its official channel on March 8. The department’s description frames the agenda: President Trump’s America First program, international relations and tariff policies, responsibly deregulating the financial sector, and re-privatizing the American economy.

Tariffs dominated. Asked whether tariffs are inflationary, Bessent said a tariff “can be a one-time price adjustment” — “nothing is more transitory than tariff if it’s a one-time price adjustment” — and pushed back on the framing that a tariff is simply a tax. The program, he said, is “a whole-of-government holistic program” that pairs any price adjustment with deleveraging the government sector and re-leveraging the private sector. On reciprocity — “tariff is his favorite word; I would say reciprocal is probably his second favorite word,” he said of the President — he argued rates can come down on both sides if partners drop their barriers: the tariffs themselves are “the easy part,” while the real negotiation covers non-tariff barriers, from local-content rules blocking U.S. products to currency suppression, subsidized industries and, as he put it, the European Union’s “gigantic fines on our U.S. tech companies.” Much of the reciprocal framework, he said, “will come out April 2nd,” and would be path-dependent on each partner’s response.

On markets, he said the administration’s focus is the ten-year Treasury yield rather than Federal Reserve rate cuts: the ten-year had fallen from nearly 5% around the inauguration to roughly 4.15–4.30%, mortgage rates were lower, and crude prices were down 15% since the President took office, as the two men stated the figures from the stage.

Why it matters

This is the earliest full statement of the Bessent doctrine, delivered to Wall Street six weeks into the job: tariffs as a possibly one-time adjustment inside a holistic program, reciprocity as the exit ramp, and the ten-year yield — not the Fed funds rate — as the administration’s scoreboard. The April 2 reciprocal-tariff rollout he previewed here became the trade program the rest of his tenure has executed.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the March 6, 2025 preview of the April 2 reciprocal-tariff framework, and the reciprocity test as Bessent stated it — rates fall if partners drop tariff and non-tariff barriers. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Secretary Scott Bessent Q&A with Larry Kudlow at the Economic Club of New York” (official upload, embedded above). Session as delivered March 6, 2025; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store. Figures as stated by the participants.