Speaking to an audience at the Ronald Reagan National Economic Forum in California, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outlines how flawed trade, financial and economic policies of the past have brought us to a critical moment where President Donald Trump needs to reset the entire system in order to protect American interests.
This is a powerful and well delivered speech certain to gain attention from those who understand the challenge. Secretary Bessent pulled no punches as he outlined how members of the audience themselves have contributed to a system that has eroded the national security of our nation state by advancing short-term interests disconnected from the American workforce and American industrial base.
The message was simple, “economic security is national security” and a failure to recognize how corporations chasing profits only contributed to the diminishment of internal American wealth. The patriotic priority must be to return economic strength to the U.S., and all Americans must benefit from renewed economic nationalism. The American system must be restored. WATCH:
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is a national treasure!
apologies, I should have read before I posted.
Man, I just Don’t have the words. This guy….thank God we have PDJT and his team.
Brilliant! The truth has to hurt to be meaningful
America should manufacture all its own critical pharmaceuticals rather than to rely on India and the ChiComs! Especially pharmaceuticals the ChiComs manufacturer! The ChiComs which are an existential threat to America!!!
What a gift he (and of course our Great President) is to our nation. Thank you for loving your country and speaking the truth the world so desperately needs to hear!
Scott should start a national financial 101 course for the nation. I enjoy listening to him, a true national treasure.
He said in the presser the other day that he is a strong believer in financial literacy; and the Trump Account app does, or will have, modules towards that end.
In less than one hour, the listener will learn more from of Mr. Bessent’s speech than four years of “education” for a business or political science degree from a typical U.S. University.
I might recommend on the Trump accounts a physical “paper” mailer, outlining his program sent to all legal American households. Put the web address on it. And, for goodness sake, put it in layman’s terms
I hope his time as SecTreasury will continue beyond 2028, God willing.
We need his intelligence and vision
He’s a fighter for America First. He pulls the levers needed in the financial realm to enable Trump’s priorities. Operation Epic Fury is a good example of this. Trump’s cabinet moves out as a team. Rubio and Hegseth traveling overseas and securing mineral and defense deals, and Greer securing trade deals.
Pray for the future, after Trump’s term is up.
Finally!
Amazing support Trump has in Bessent to reset the American economic landscape. Can you imagine if Kameltoes had won the election?? God has given us a second chance. So thankful for Trump and his team! MAGA!!
We would be looking at asset appropriation, DEI hires, and capital flight.
Amen.
This will certainly express to much optimism for Democrats during the term of a Republican president.
And CEO and executive pay MUST go back to where it was 45-50 years ago. The average CEO pay today is over 1,000 times what the average worker salary is. The average salary worker is also smarter than the CEO by a large margin. CEOs and executives of large corporations are put in place by people that go to the same schools, hang out at the same bars, belong to the same country clubs, etc.
The owner of a company making huge $$$ is one thing because he or she is the owner, kudos to them. But an executive? No, that’s got to stop. The country needs to get back to where only one spouse has to work and provide (I hate this class crap) a middle class life, and executive pay MUST be decreased by a huge amount.
What would be fitting is ~50 years of relative wage stagnation for the C-suite.
The gap will naturally narrow for the rest with strong economic growth that lifts all boats.
Logical but for the rank and file that is a 3rd of their working years waiting for parity if their elevation is directly attached to the draw down of “C-suite” compensation. Just saying there’s alot of pent up anger not just frustration and a benefit of doing it more quickly is that many more will be able to save for their kids college and their own retirements and have a chance at home ownership vs the contemporary status quo of being vulnerable to the ideologues who like to manipulate outcomes. Done more rapidly restores the American Dream and stimulates our economy. Another positive result would be that those manipulating ideologues would need to find a different career path instead of effing with people’s lives based on aspects that cannot be altered. JMO.
Wall Street has to be held accountable also. They are a major player in the destruction of the American middle class. Acquiring companies, milking them dry financially, then selling the husk. Buying companies and then using the company’s profits for stock buyback instead of reinvesting in the company R&D or future growth opportunities. For example, one of the main reasons Boeing is a financially weak company is that since 1997 they have spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks not R&D, reinvestment et al. Compounding the problem is that since 2013 they have been run by financial and accounting people not engineers.
It has always been my position that the top person in an organization should not be compensated more than 100 times the lowest paid employee or contracted person.
The company can pay whatever it wishes or can afford but all personnel get paid to scale. That would stop the stock manipulation so the big boys can get more compensation. It would stop the hiring of cheap contractors paying slave wages in the place of fulltime employees also.
The people toward the bottom are just as important to the success of the company as the CEO, sometimes more so.
An honest question here…a financial one….when contemplating “flawed trade, financial and economic policies”…
This Chinese bus driver could not speak or read English.
How did he pay for his CDL? Just hand over some Benjamins and took the change? One thing I am betting…he probably knew how to make change on the American dollar and understand how much cash he had left on his EBT.
5 killed, 44 injured.
First responder costs, for a mass casualty event, I have no idea about costs, you know it was high-49 ambulances?. LEO investigatory costs, for the accident, again unknown. Big shots showing up? Again, unknown cost.
For the injured, am guessing the ER stay combined, would be over 2 million, conservatively. Then hospital admissions with all the required doctors and consultants, lab and x-rays meds etc…pricey even if a short admission. But would guess well over 100k per patient. Costs to health ins. companies. Patient out of pocket costs, unknown. Cost of lost worker productivity, unknown.
For those killed, costs of autopsies, undertaker and funeral costs and family travel, another million. Then the lifelong heartache for the families…cannot put a price tag on that. The lost futures of the children. Maybe we lost an astronaut or future President?
Funny how the bean counters are nowhere to be seen or heard from?
On this one, the buck stops in Albany. I would love to see a dollar amount on this accident….
And prayers for all affected…May God our Father hold them all close.
Lives are above any calculated “cost” as you know. Incalculable when we lose US citizens.
ussc except 2, where are you?
I keep telling people, ‘cheap labor is not cheap’.
Ahhh the infamous “But who will pick our $1 lettuce?” argument that completely ignores the lettuce picker’s 7 kids on food stamps and crushing our crappy public school resources while paying next to nothing in taxes.
I’m not wealthy by any stretch, but I’ll gladly pay more for my friggin lettuce and mushrooms if the job goes to an American being paid an honest salary. The current system just shifts the cost of slave labor from the plantation owner to the taxpayer.
Sovereignty 101. Bessett gets it.
Resilience, it means many things. It is critical and got lost in people’s world view.
Resilience means producing a tractor which a farmer can service and maintain rather than a computerized to every convenience wonder machine which requires a liscenced dealer and liscenced software to repair! …which fails and leaves a havest in the field or a planting undone because the farmer signed an agreement with the manufacturer that he could not and would not repair it…..
Ridiculous right?
Sometimes it all goes back to the basics, sometimes the basics define the necessity.
Resilience is a paramount consideration to individual liberty without which there is no collective liberty…..only collective failure.
Resilience is a concept core to America.
I could listen to this man for hours. He clearly and brilliantly explains “what went wrong” and “what we a doing to repair it”.
It’s interesting to note that Bessent is not an economist, but rather an economic historian who also received practical experience as a stock analyst and portfolio manager.
Bessent and Lutnik both have very strong, successful financial backgrounds and are very sharp. President Trump has utilized his Treasury Secretary in a range of different tasks, including diplomacy. I hope that Bessent stays around for an encore in the next administration. I enjoyed the interview.
“The message was simple, ‘economic security is national security’ and a failure to recognize how corporations chasing profits only contributed to the diminishment of internal American wealth.”
2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf, p. 13-14:
[B]ecause economic security is fundamental to national security, we will work to further strengthen the American economy, with emphases on:
Peter Navarro on 12/1/18: Economic Security is National Security – National Defense Transportation Association
Peter Navarro on 12/10/18: Why Economic Security Is National Security – The White House
Since they didn’t listen then, Navarro 2018, will they listen now, Bessent 2026?
Or did they know way back when they did it all?
And just don’t want anyone to listen and stop them?
“They”have “othered” the rest of us for generations. Of course they knew. No question in my mind.
I went through college in the 70’s. High school had prepared me somewhat for college but most all of my professors were smart, topic focused and they prepared me somewhat for a career in teaching. I was involved as a teacher and administrator for over 40 years. Graduate school was where I truly became educated.
Now, at age 75, I realize that I was educated. I seem to know a lot but I am weak in computer knowledge. People today are using technology in their jobs and us seniors are somewhat cut out of that knowledge. With retirement and age related illnesses, it is easy to not keep up with fast changing technology.
I believe that education and re-education are keys to turning back this modern trend for Socialism to emerge as out best bet for the future. We now see that Senators and Representatives are endorsing Socialism. I took enough economics courses in college and I can’t remember a single one that promoted the notion that Socialism would be good for this nation.. When Trump and his advisors get Iran settled and drugs under some kind of control, EDUCATION has to become the focus.
People should not question Capitalism but understand it. The greed that is the fabric of our country today needs to be examined.
One example of greed came with me learning that the cost of protecting our dogs and cats from fleas and ticks is now prohibitive. Then we get the message that ticks carrying diseases that will main and kill us are running wild in this country.. The cost to control them is prohibitive. Who profits from the cost of what has become the new Covid shot except it is for our pets and animals? Oh, they are sneaky, aren’t they?
I believe that Scott Bessent is a national treasure and that with him and others, life in our country can return to the days when houses did not cost six hundred thousand dollars and rents were not subject to doubling ever year and when kids could become educated in a way that helps them become productive members of society. School systems have gotten torn apart and replaced by special school that may or may not be teaching what American children need to know. All of this is involved in the changing fabric of our country.
People need to be taught that capitalism and corporatism are two different things.
We do not currently have capitalism. We have corporatism.
Greed is the love of money and is the root of all evil. Greed is in socialism and communism. Greed within capitalism becomes corporatism and cronyism.
Since Nixon opened up the USA to China, capitalism has been hijacked and distorted to the detriment of Americans. Business owners saw their ideas and products stolen and taken to China to be produced by slave labor. They could not compete against that new system and had to move to China or other foreign nations to compete.
It was only PDJT that finally equalized the playing field with tariffs that we are seeing capitalists return jobs and industries back to America.
And people really need to understand the difference and how corporatism is dangerous and ethical capitalism is the answer.
Fabulous! USA needs LEADERSHIP of Trump, Gabbard, Rubio & Bessent for 1000 years!!
Careful now, (AI can provide that illusion for us.)
What a speech! These words need to be spread more widely than just those of us who inhabit the Tree House. As someone who has been working long before Ross Perot’s “giant sucking sound” speech and knew he was right, who heard Obama’s “those jobs aren’t coming back” speech and wanted to vomit, President Trump is attempting to pull this nation back from the brink. And Mr. Bessent could not have articulated it for the President any more clearly. Great, great speech.