July 30, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
51:26
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Remember, President Trump's entire program is on turning around the doldrums of the Biden economy, doing a supply-side tax cut, and getting to 2.83, 3.5 percent growth. | ||
| The American economy, to be robust, to be replacing jobs, to keep unemployment down, to keep the whole apparatus or the whole project moving forward, you need minimum of like 3 percent growth. | ||
| You have to have 3 percent growth or higher. | ||
| And particularly in Scott Besson's plan at Treasury, you need, and I think Chip agrees, it's 3.5 percent, but even at 3 percent, you start to get ahead of where you're growing the economy and tax revenues and tariff revenues higher than you're adding deficits from spending. | ||
| Now, that's what a supply-side tax cut's about. | ||
| People say, well, that's very risky. | ||
| Well, it's not risky in the fact of you understand the elements that you're putting in there. | ||
| Up 3%, up 3%, better than expected. | ||
| That would be the highest level since the third quarter of 24 when it was up 3.1%. | ||
| On the consumption side, up 1.4, very close to estimates. | ||
| Up 1.4 would be the best since the last quarter of 24. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we've got a stronger than expected GDP number, 3% for the second quarter initial read. | |
| That's up from a half percent in the first quarter. | ||
| 2.6% was what was forecast. | ||
| Now, again, GDP, this is the first read of the second quarter coming in at 3%. | ||
| That is better than expected, 2.4%. | ||
| I want to bring in Adam Johnson. | ||
| Markets are certainly watching this right now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Goldilocks, because I would add to that, Cheryl, that the GDP price index was only 2%, and the expectation was 2.2. | |
| In other words, we have an economy growing at, what do you say, 3%. | ||
| We have inflation at 2%. | ||
| That's the best of both worlds. | ||
| So I'm very positive on that report, at least in the moment. | ||
| The left and people that don't like the president and don't want things to work. | ||
| And, you know, like Senator Elizabeth Moore will come on and say, inflation's out of control and the economy is getting killed by what's happening by these tariffs. | ||
| This 3% with the market at new highs, and really we haven't seen inflation go up back to 3%. | ||
| Maybe it will this week. | ||
| Maybe we'll see it. | ||
| But none of these horrible things have happened, but they still talk like it's happening. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Well, there's an important lesson there. | ||
| Don't pick a congressman to be your money manager. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| But in the end, Congress has their own reasons to point out certain things. | ||
| And the Democrats, of course, as you pointed out, really don't want to see the current administration have some success. | ||
| But there's no doubt that this is some success. | ||
| We're seeing more horsepower. | ||
| We're seeing better equities. | ||
| Inflation, inflation really hasn't changed much in the last year or so. | ||
| Yeah, beat on the ADP number here. | ||
| 104,000 versus a 64,000 estimate and reversing the negative number from last month. | ||
| I'll talk about their vision in a second. | ||
| But the goods sector, doing what it's been doing, about plus 31,000. | ||
| Service sector, 74,000. | ||
| And there's the non-farm payroll estimate. | ||
| Remember, ADP is only estimating private payrolls and not really even trying to mimic the BLS, just doing its own thing and saying, here's what our data show about national job growth. | ||
| June was revised to minus 23 from the original, minus 33. | ||
| Small business back in the game here, plus 12,000 had been down the prior two months. | ||
| Medium and large business, both at 46,000. | ||
| Buy industry, well, there's leisure and hospitality again, plus 46,000. | ||
| Financial activities, plus 28. | ||
| Trade, transportation, and utilities, up 18,000. | ||
| Construction, part of that goods-producing number that we told you. | ||
| And the weird number here, the education and health service is down by 38,000. | ||
| That has been a perennial source of job growth. | ||
| Looking at wage gains, job stayers remaining unchanged plus 4.4%. | ||
| But if you change jobs, you get a 7% raise. | ||
| That's up two tenths from the prior month. | ||
| ADP chief economist Neala Richardson writing in the report, our hiring and pay data are broadly indicative of a healthy economy. | ||
| Employers have grown more optimistic that consumers will remain resilient. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | ||
| It's Wednesday, 30 July, Year of Our Lord, 2025. | ||
| We're going to go momentarily, I think at like around 10.30. | ||
| The great Matt Boyle at Breitbart will be interviewing Scott Besson, Secretary of the Treasury, former contributor to the War Room around 10.30 on this, a breaking day of the Federal Reserve. | ||
| It's going to come out. | ||
| And of course, we've got numbers, GDP numbers, and ADP, the early look at employment numbers. | ||
| I'm seeing some pattern recognition. | ||
| Remember the number 3%? | ||
| And look, it's too early for a lot of the BBB, the Big Beautiful bill, to kick in buy it from tariffs, animal spirits. | ||
| You're starting to see it. | ||
| EJ Antonio joins us this morning. | ||
| EJ, walk us through both the GDP and the labored number, sir. | ||
| Well, Steve, thanks so much for having me. | ||
| This GDP report, I mean, really is an absolute blockbuster. | ||
| It completely defies expectations. | ||
| It's not only a good headline number, it has good internals as well. | ||
| And we can talk about some of those. | ||
| So we got a three-handle today. | ||
| We were up 3.0%. | ||
| A lot of people thought we couldn't even get that by the fourth quarter of this year. | ||
| And we already have it right now. | ||
| Much of what happened in this report was reversal of the first quarter. | ||
| In the first quarter, there was front running of tariffs. | ||
| There were import surges. | ||
| And again, all of that has completely reversed. | ||
| And so, just as imports subtracted from GDP in the first quarter, the lack of imports added in the second quarter to that GDP number. | ||
| And so, if we look at the overall trend, Steve, what we find, again, is a lot of positive news. | ||
| We find that consumer spending is up. | ||
| We find that government spending, as measured by government purchases, is actually flat for the year. | ||
| In fact, it's off like a tiny fraction of a percent, like, you know, a tenth of a percent, maybe a few hundredths of a percent. | ||
| But the fact is government is not growing here. | ||
| The private sector is delivering literally all of the economic growth in 2025. | ||
| There were people who told us that if government doesn't keep spending, we're going to have a recession. | ||
| The economy is going to collapse. | ||
| They were absolutely wrong. | ||
| Instead, what we're seeing is personal income growing. | ||
| Not only is personal income growing, Steve, but even after adjusting for inflation, in other words, real personal income is still up. | ||
| It was up 3% in the second quarter. | ||
| That was enough to lift real disposable incomes and even push the savings rate to its highest level in a year. | ||
| So although a lot of people are still hurting, I don't mean to say that everything is all sunshine and rainbows. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| We're in a pretty deep hole after four years of Biden. | ||
| But that being said, things are really moving in the right direction here, Steve. | ||
| It really is remarkable that after just six months, we've had this much of an economic turnaround. | ||
| And so incomes are going up. | ||
| Again, even after adjusting for inflation, more people are able to save. | ||
| That's really, really good news. | ||
| It's not to say everybody's doing okay. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| But things are finally moving in the right direction. | ||
| And that is absolutely phenomenal news. | ||
| And we haven't even seen the effects of the big, beautiful bill kick in, as you were just talking about. | ||
| We haven't even yet seen the increase in investment that that's going to deliver. | ||
| The real driver of long-term economic growth, Steve, is what we call fixed private investment. | ||
| So that would be investment that doesn't include things like inventory, for example. | ||
| And within fixed investment, we can even exclude residential investment. | ||
| So not talk about building homes. | ||
| We just want to talk about non-residential. | ||
| So building factories, building equipment, all of that. | ||
| That did not go up very much in the second quarter. | ||
| It was only up a fraction of a percent. | ||
| But we can expect that to go up big time in the third quarter because now we have full expensing of things like plant and equipment. | ||
| That's going to provide a huge tax incentive for folks to build stuff here in the U.S., to manufacture here in the U.S. I mean, things are really looking bright for the second half of 2025. | ||
| You know, I was with you. | ||
| I didn't think that 3%, I kept using 3% and eventually 3.4% or above because as you remember, and we talk about it all the time, in President Trump's first term, the average was 2.8% growth. | ||
| The fourth quarter of 2019, when things were really converging and coming together, it was 3.4%. | ||
| So we thought it was achievable, but it was going to take a while. | ||
| I said on the show, I think a week ago, I talked to a lot of businessmen and real estate people about exactly what you just said, that their phones are ringing off the hook. | ||
| People are looking to either take old abandoned plants or facilities that were left maybe not used to maximum capacity. | ||
| And they're looking to purchase capital equipment and to expand production, to expand actual capital investment, which you've drilled into our heads, EJ, is absolutely the essential thing you have to do. | ||
| And that would actually do it now. | ||
| You fully expenses, but you feel the implications of that. | ||
| I don't know, in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of next year. | ||
| This starts off with a bang. | ||
| And folks, what we talk about, this is like when we talk about birch gold about it's not the price of gold, it's the converging forces that drive it. | ||
| The same thing here at the economy on the GDP. | ||
| It's the converging forces. | ||
| What you have in here, EJ, you can tell you have the closing of the border and the self-deportations of a ton of these illegal alien invaders are just going home because they understand it's going to be tough. | ||
| This is why, just look at the freeways in LA. | ||
| That's where you're starting to see wages. | ||
| Hey, things aren't slowing down. | ||
| They're picking up. | ||
| And American citizens are getting those jobs. | ||
| And you're seeing that now from the, you know, the lack of this relentless pressure of illegal aliens coming across, hundreds of thousands coming across the border every day. | ||
| You're starting to see, they're starting to see the initial impact of the tariffs and the people saying, hey, I want to avoid the 15% tariff. | ||
| I want to build a facility here. | ||
| Let's get some, let's start talking to people about long-term capital investment. | ||
| This is all converging together, right? | ||
| If we get our financial house in order, you could turbocharge this. | ||
| Your thoughts on that, EJ? | ||
| Steve, I think that's exactly right. | ||
| Look at how much the private sector is growing when we prevent government from growing. | ||
| In other words, we're giving the private sector the breathing room that it needs to expand and to grow and to increase prosperity. | ||
| All you literally need to do is have the government do nothing, get out of the way. | ||
| And as the Trump administration has done that so successfully, whether it's the president or the treasury secretary or the heads of the other departments and agencies who have all issued these directives to get the spending down, it is having remarkable effects and very, very quickly as well. | ||
| Another thing, Steve, since you mentioned the tariffs, so many people thought that this was going to cause runaway inflation. | ||
| The inflation number here in this report, one of the measurements that we can use for inflation is the price index for GDP. | ||
| The increase there, the rate of increase fell by almost half. | ||
| It's down to 2%. | ||
| It was almost 4% in the first quarter. | ||
| And even that, honestly, had very little to do with the Trump administration. | ||
| Most of that increase was due to prices jumping in the month of January. | ||
| And obviously, President Trump didn't even take over until the end of that month. | ||
| So much of that Q1 inflation was just baked into the cake by Inauguration Day. | ||
| So what we've seen is the exact opposite of what all the doomsayers told us was going to happen. | ||
| We have not seen the economy collapse, and we have not seen inflation skyrocket. | ||
| Instead, we've seen exactly the opposite of both of those two. | ||
| And part of the reason for that is another thing that you touched on, which is the reprivatization and the re-Americanization, if you want to call it that, of our labor market. | ||
| And what we've seen now is not only an increase in the number of jobs, a steady increase in the number of jobs, while the federal workforce, the number of bureaucrats has been declining every month of this year. | ||
| Not only have we seen more jobs, but it's more Americans getting those jobs. | ||
| We're no longer reliant on inexpensive, low-skill or no-skill labor from abroad flooding in to keep costs down, whether it's labor costs or other costs. | ||
| Instead, what we're seeing is an increase in good paying jobs and an increase in the number of Americans getting those jobs. | ||
| And that's really getting confirmed not only by the publicly available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we're increasingly seeing that from private sector sources as well, whether it's the payroll processing companies ADP or paychecks with an X, or it's other sources like purchasing manager indexes, what we call PMIs. | ||
| We're seeing it in the Federal Reserve Bank data, the regional federal reserve banks. | ||
| Again, I don't want to say that everything is sunshine and roses and rainbows. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not. | |
| There's a lot of problems in the economy. | ||
| We've dug ourselves a very deep hole, and it's going to take a while to dig ourselves out of it. | ||
| But what I can say, Steve, is that the downward trajectory has stopped. | ||
| We've leveled out and we're back on the upswing. | ||
| It's going to take us time, I understand that, to get back to where we were in 2019. | ||
| But again, things are moving in the right direction. | ||
| EJ, hang on for one second. | ||
| We'll take a short break. | ||
| I know you got to bounce. | ||
| You're a wanted man today, but I got just a couple more questions on the other side. | ||
| EJ is 100% correct. | ||
| And remember, Liberation Day on April 1st, and now August 1st. | ||
| They're coming down to it. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| EJ on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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Kill America's Voice family. | |
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| It's free. | ||
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It's uncensored, and it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out. | |
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It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day. | |
| You want to know what Steve Bannon's thinking go to get her? | ||
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That's right. | |
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| Steve Bannon, Charlie Cook, Jack the Soviet, and so many more. | ||
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| You know, I always watch and see who buys the New York Post because it tells me that people want an alternative to people like you or me. | ||
| They want an alternative. | ||
| They want the Trumpian view. | ||
| And maybe they want to expose themselves to the Trumpian view so they can expose the weaknesses they've got. | ||
| But also, to be honest with you, the country is moving towards Trump. | ||
| These polls that come out and show him not doing well, I don't buy that. | ||
| I think his strength is still greater than the Democratic strength. | ||
| He is a stronger public figure than the Democratic people. | ||
| I mean, Obama still has tremendous charisma, but Trump has strength. | ||
| And I think that's what all voters look for. | ||
| But they want a president who is a strong figure. | ||
| And he's got it. | ||
| Okay, let me have it. | ||
| Let me have it. | ||
| Thank you, Denver. | ||
| Right there, I wanted to play that because it's about the animal spirits. | ||
| I want this audience to understand something. | ||
| Point blank. | ||
| You did this. | ||
| This is your win. | ||
| You backed Trump in the darkest days. | ||
| And on Liberation Day on April 1st, when all the geniuses were mocking us, oh, this is terrible. | ||
| Trump doesn't know what he's doing. | ||
| It's going to go to the depression. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You hammered through this. | ||
| And E.J. Antoni is absolutely correct. | ||
| This is not an end point. | ||
| It's all a process. | ||
| But we've hit an inflection point already. | ||
| And a big part of that is the animal spirits. | ||
| This is the core of capitalism, to unleash the animal spirits of the entrepreneur, of the American worker. | ||
| E.J. Antony, how important is that in this beginning? | ||
| Because you can start to see, we ain't in the sunlit uplands yet, but baby, ahead you can see it. | ||
| It's in the far distance, but you know you're on a path now. | ||
| You're on a journey. | ||
| E.J. Antoni. | ||
| And Steve, that's all the entrepreneur needs. | ||
| As long as he knows that he's going to be able to keep what he earns, as long as he knows he's going to be able to benefit from his own inventions, let's say, or the work of his labor, he is going to go ahead and do those things. | ||
| Thomas Sowell famously said that wealth is created when those who know how to do it are free to do so. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Again, this is all about government getting out of the way and unleashing those animal spirits. | ||
| You don't need to create them. | ||
| They're naturally there. | ||
| It's part of the human condition. | ||
| Humans are born into poverty and we desire to get out of it. | ||
| And if you simply allow people to do so, if you respect people's property rights, for example, then they will go ahead and they will achieve those ends. | ||
| And that's precisely what we're seeing right now. | ||
| As you get government out of the way, whether it's taxation or regulation, you are going to see this economy continue to take off. | ||
| Give me the two or three things you looked at in this GDP report that you say, hey, this is giving me comfort that I can see the arc that we're on. | ||
| I see the path that we're on. | ||
| What are the ones? | ||
| Make us smart here, EJ. | ||
| What's your big takeaways from this? | ||
| This is entirely private sector growth. | ||
| This year, the government hasn't grown at all. | ||
| So that's absolutely phenomenal news. | ||
| Again, all of the growth that we have seen this year is coming from the private sector. | ||
| What a stark contrast that is to the Biden administration, where it was disproportionately reliance on excess government spending that drove us deeper and deeper into this massive debt hole. | ||
| So there's that huge takeaway. | ||
| Also, the fact that we are seeing inflation not go up, but go down. | ||
| Another great, great sign. | ||
| That's not to say price increases have stopped entirely, but the rate of increase has slowed pretty dramatically. | ||
| And then finally, just that really, really good headline Number. | ||
| We already have a three-handle, 3.0%. | ||
| Phenomenal news. | ||
| The economy is not losing steam. | ||
| It is gaining steam. | ||
| Really great news to see that we're already having an acceleration of growth, and that's before you get an investment surge from the Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| So we can anticipate even better economic growth, I think, in the months and years ahead. | ||
| I remember I kept talking about 3.4% from 19. | ||
| This is a couple of quarters ahead of where I thought we'd be. | ||
| So it's a great inflection point. | ||
| ADP, you normally come on here and talk about the first cut at the labor numbers. | ||
| What was in the ADP report that excited you and what concerned you? | ||
| Well, in terms of that ADP report, not only seeing growth in the month of July, but also seeing June having to have a big upward revision. | ||
| In other words, ADP realizing, oops, we completely botched this one. | ||
| That was something we actually talked about, I think, last time I was on with you, Steve. | ||
| Thank you for having me then, too. | ||
| And essentially, what they're having to do is realize that, oh, I guess all of our predictions are wrong. | ||
| In other words, we're having to reevaluate how we look at this data to come to our conclusions. | ||
| Because, again, they're approaching this with terrible biases that are then skewing their results. | ||
| EJ, amazing. | ||
| And now I'm convinced that we can't let you go into Treasury. | ||
| You've got to be on the outside to be one of the surrogates so you can do all the shows and get everything done and do all your great work on the outside. | ||
| You're amazing. | ||
| Another called shot from EJ Antoni. | ||
| Sir, your Twitter is on fire. | ||
| Where do people go and get it? | ||
| That's going to be the best place to find me. | ||
| The handle is at real EJ Antoni. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We're going to go. | ||
| We got a lot on this Tulsi situation. | ||
| John Salmon is going to join me later. | ||
| President of the United States reposted a big old meme about Obama and treason, and it's powerful. | ||
| And now we've got to stick the landing. | ||
| We're going to get to that shortly. | ||
| I asked Dave Walsh. | ||
| I was going to have Dave on today, but I asked to move up his hit because I want him here on the economic part. | ||
| Dave, full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| Maybe we'll make a caveat for wind. | ||
| I think President Trump has officially gone to war with wind. | ||
| But talk to me about these numbers in light of it's only starting to kick in the return to President Trump's full spectrum energy dominance, sir. | ||
| Well, we have a new, I mean, the new emerging threat to electrification for our ratepayers out there, average citizens, is AI and data centers. | ||
| We just saw in the last day here a revised forecast through The Economist of 2.5% growth per year in power generation needed just for AI and data centers. | ||
| Before, McKinsey, Booz, Allen, BCG had been projecting about 0.9% per year power growth for data centers and AI. | ||
| This will take that forecast up by a factor of almost three times to 2.5% a year on top of consumer demand for power itself, ratepayers growing 1.6% a year, would mean a 4.1% every year growth in necessary power generation. | ||
| That compares to the whole period since the 2008 collapse of only 0.5% per year electrification growth was necessary, eight times more now in the next four years, which says we'd have up to a 500,000 megawatt shortage of electric power in the country by 2030 because of data centers and AI now, if you will, hogging up to two-thirds of new capacity demand. | ||
| So you've got these asset plays going on, such as I sent to Denver a picture of the Google acquisition of existing hydro capacity in Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna last week, announced that about 650 megawatts Google broadcast like it's some new capacity they've acquired, $3 billion. | ||
| This is like 50-year-old capacity that has supported ratepayers in PJM forever with pretty much baseload power, except July and August when the water's low. | ||
| Rest of the year, full-time, buying that away from ratepayers and now hoarding it by Google for data center and server center D. Hang on for a second. | ||
| Hang on a second. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| I want to make sure for the viewers, because we just had these GDP numbers and we had this, and we do have this, I don't want to call it a specter, but there's something, and I want to make sure we converge. | ||
| Given the GDP numbers that we just saw, given the fact that the foundational element, as we've talked about over and over and over again with Trump, it's not tax cuts. | ||
| And tariffs is a big part, but the fundamental part of Trump's economic growth plan has always been full-spectrum energy dominance and the cheapest forms of energy and plentiful energy. | ||
| So access, availability, and cheap, right? | ||
| I mean, when you talk about Trump's economics, and anytime you're in a room with him, this is what he talks about. | ||
| We have a hole we have to dig ourselves out of, right? | ||
| From the Biden years. | ||
| What EJ just said back there, please take your number two pencil and write this down. | ||
| This is private sector growth. | ||
| When Biden, these guys went on MSMB, CNC, and they're talking about, oh, we got growth, we got growth. | ||
| It always came from more government spending. | ||
| It all came from, it was a Keynesian stimulus over and over again. | ||
| As we told you, this is what was going to drive inflation. | ||
| President Trump's theory of the case is totally different. | ||
| And this is why, by the way, we're going to have Wade Miller on tonight. | ||
| Wade Miller is going to come on from Sierra to talk about the rescissions. | ||
| Where's the pocket rescissions? | ||
| Where are the rescissions packages? | ||
| Where's all these cuts? | ||
| But private sector growth. | ||
| Finally, we're starting to turn this ship around. | ||
| Now, a big part of that is you're seeing the beginning of all the executive orders and everything President Trump has done at the beginning on energy. | ||
| Because once again, energy with tariffs in a closed border, right? | ||
| So you have in EJ's great term, the re-Americanization of the labor force. | ||
| It's all coming together. | ||
| Now, at the same time, there is an underlying tension. | ||
| This is where Elon and David Saxon, these guys say, hey, I can see us getting to 4.5% because it's going to be driven by technology. | ||
| It's going to be driven by AI. | ||
| There's a very interesting thing that has to happen there. | ||
| And can it start to chop block or slow the economy of the rest of the economy? | ||
| And that is energy. | ||
| And that is these data centers. | ||
| And this is something we want to make sure you fully understand right now. | ||
| So, because that's quite important. | ||
| Dave Walsh, hang on. | ||
| We're going to take a short break. | ||
| Birch Gold. | ||
| Now more than ever, you got to understand it. | ||
| Go to endofthellar empire, birchgold.com slash bannon. | ||
| That would be me. | ||
| End of the dollar empire, seven free installments. | ||
| Eighth is coming. | ||
| Ninth we're working on. | ||
| Read it. | ||
| Talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Any issues with this White House taking the power of the purse away from Congress? | ||
| Do you worry that what's happening right now is sort of making Congress a rubber stamp and be careful how I say this, but a lesser branch of government? | ||
| You know, I think for a long time Congress has been abdicating their power of the purse. | ||
| In fact, what happens almost every year is there are no appropriation bills and there's one big bill and really most rank-and-file people have nothing to do with it. | ||
| Even the appropriation committees have very little to do with it. | ||
| And one person, the leader of the majority and the leader of the minority, work out the details. | ||
| And if you're a special interest and you want one specific tax break, you don't bother talking to any rank and file congressman to tell them the pros and cons of this. | ||
| You go to one person. | ||
| And that's why the leaders in both parties raise millions and millions of dollars because both corporate and labor interests only go to the top of the party, only go to the leadership. | ||
| And the whole, you know, having the power of the person, the adjudication of what we spend doesn't really happen because the process is so broken. | ||
| We rarely have budgets. | ||
| We rarely have appropriations bill. | ||
| It's what I've been telling people since the first big, beautiful bill of the summer is that we're going to get another big, beautiful omnibus come the end of September. | ||
| And that's what normally happens. | ||
| Some enormous bill nobody can read, put out without a couple hours to look at it. | ||
| That's what will happen September 30th because the system's so broken, people haven't woken up enough to really change it. | ||
| Ooh, Mr. Bannon, you told us that a couple of days ago, and now you heard it from Rand Paul. | ||
| What did E.J. Antony just tell us? | ||
| That the private sector is growing faster than public sector of the spending, cut the spending, and you're going to get growth. | ||
| You keep cutting it back, you're going to get turbo growth, turbocharged growth. | ||
| Right there, he said the quiet part out loud. | ||
| I'm telling you, the Senate under John Thune, who are not doing any, they're going to leave here and do almost virtually no getting his people on board, President Trump's people, the confirmation process. | ||
| He's not going to go into recess. | ||
| Right there, they're telling you they don't trust Trump. | ||
| If they don't go into recess, formal recess, it shows you it is in the president's face. | ||
| President finally last night came out. | ||
| Guess what he was raving about? | ||
| Blue slips. | ||
| You heard about blue slips here over the last couple weeks? | ||
| He's all over Grassley. | ||
| They're not giving him the people he wants. | ||
| And right now, Rand Paul just told you, so don't say you haven't been warned, War Room posse. | ||
| So get ready for it, baby. | ||
| They're going to come back here after Labor Day in the third week of September, in the run-up to the 30th of September. | ||
| They're going to drop a 9,000-page omnibus for the entire year. | ||
| And it's going to have every evil you want in there. | ||
| And it'll be what chokes down growth. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because all about federal spending. | ||
| We need rescissions. | ||
| We need pocket rescissions. | ||
| We need impoundments. | ||
| Keep cutting. | ||
| And this thing will get to 3.4%. | ||
| We'll get over 3.5%. | ||
| We'll get to wait for it. | ||
| Put a four handle on it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Then the theory of the cases and the all-markets, you can't grow aware of it. | ||
| Hey, you got it. | ||
| As I said, you got a shot. | ||
| This is your last shot. | ||
| Why not take your last shot? | ||
| Because if you don't do it now, you're not going to have a shot. | ||
| And the big, beautiful bill had a lot of, you know, there was some ugly warts on it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We didn't love it all. | ||
| But it gave you a shot for a supply side. | ||
| And right there, Rand Paul told you. | ||
| So you bet, take your number two principal out. | ||
| You've been warned. | ||
| I told you this was going to happen. | ||
| And Rand Paul said, hey, they're working on it right now. | ||
| When they say bipartisan appropriations, that means Democrats and big government Republicans coming in with massive checks. | ||
| We're going to go to Scott Besson in a second. | ||
| I want to go back to, by the way, take your phone out, Bannon, at text Bannon 989898. | ||
| Get the ultimate guide from Birch Gold. | ||
| It's a quick study and it's free to get you up to speed on capital markets, all of it. | ||
| You need that now more than ever to understand all this is going on, particularly the jargon. | ||
| So Dave Walsh, number one. | ||
| Scott Besson? | ||
| Okay, hang on for one second. | ||
| Let's go live to the Breitbart event with the great Matt Bull, Scott Besson. | ||
| We're going to listen in, see what we've got going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Dave Walsh on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much for coming. | |
| The chairman of the National Bank of Kirst. | ||
| I'd also like to thank Ballard Partners and the Financial Services Forum. | ||
| I'm glad you could be with us today. | ||
| Let's get things started with Breitbart News Editor, Washington Bureau Chief Matt Boyle, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, first off, really want to thank you for taking the time to do this. | ||
| We get to start with the big breaking news. | ||
| GDP, 3% for the second quarter this year. | ||
| Numbers out this morning. | ||
| Blew away expectations. | ||
| The Trump boom is real. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| Well, as I was trying to explain to people who panicked on April 2nd, we're doing peace deals, trade deals, tax deals, and they're all coming together. | ||
| And a lot of it is just confidence and momentum coming back. | ||
| I was never concerned about what was going to happen. | ||
| There was a lot of disinformation, a lot of whatabout-ism. | ||
| What if we have this inflation? | ||
| What if terrorists do this? | ||
| What if that? | ||
| And I just think the underlying fundamentals and the policies that President Trump's putting in place are incredible. | ||
| When you think about the one big beautiful bill, the permanence of that is the confidence that that's going to build. | ||
| I think it was Al Jolson after he saw the first talkie movie. | ||
| He said, you ain't seen nothing yet. | ||
| Like, I think we're just going to accelerate third, fourth quarter. | ||
| And I think we can go back to the 90s, where we had this very strong non-inflationary growth for a decade. | ||
| Because right now we're also seeing about 1% of GDP in AI spending by the hyperscalers. | ||
| So all in, they're roughly spending $300 billion a year. | ||
| And in a perfect world, and world's never perfect, but in my dream world, they would keep spending. | ||
| And then the AI productivity boom would kick in first, second quarter, next year. | ||
| And we could have something that looks like the 90s that hopefully ends in a better way. | ||
| So people are excited about this. | ||
| So the other thing, the other big numbers that came out this morning, ADP jobs numbers, also better than expected, 104,000. | ||
| Private sector job growth. | ||
| You've called the broader picture of the American economy that's been coming together the Trump economic miracle. | ||
| Talk to us about the ADP jobs numbers, private sector job growth, and the broader Trump economic miracle. | ||
| Well, I think one thing that's important here is there's the job numbers, but then we look at the number of jobs for American citizens, and that's really taken off. | ||
| And somehow, in the academic literature, in the mainstream media for years, the one area where supply and demand didn't matter was low-end labor. | ||
| We can let hundreds of thousands, then it turned into millions, and then maybe tens of millions of people cross the border, and it wouldn't suppress wages. | ||
| And now, I think that we've had this horrible, horrible despair, especially among young men aged 16 to 35. | ||
| We're seeing a real problem there. | ||
| But I think now that we're seeing real wage growth, that good, high-paying jobs are coming back, that I think this is just going to build on itself. | ||
| Because a lot of these commitments for the trade deals are for substantial investments in the U.S. One of the things you mentioned, you mentioned wages. | ||
| We're seeing wages outpace inflation this year. | ||
| This is a big deal. | ||
| I don't think this happened during Biden's presidency. | ||
| I think this is a unique thing to President Trump's economy. | ||
| Can you talk to us a little bit about that? | ||
| I think other than, I'm sure the president would agree with me on both, other than the fact he's the most transformative political figure of this century, the other reason he won is because the bottom 50% of working Americans got crushed. | ||
| That if you go by the standard inflation numbers, PCE, CPI, during the Biden years, it was about 18 or 21 percent. | ||
| The wages, reported wages for working Americans were about 3% below those numbers, but that isn't the real story because working class Americans have a different basket of goods and services than everyone in this room. | ||
| They're dependent on used cars, insurance, rent. | ||
| They don't have assets. | ||
| So they probably experienced inflation between 32, 35% with wage growth at 16%. | ||
| So they had a gigantic, gigantic loss of purchasing power. | ||
| And so with this administration, we're committed to doing two things. | ||
| Everyone says, how are you going to fix the affordability crisis? | ||
| And the first way to do it was to bring down inflation, to make sure inflation doesn't get worse. | ||
| So in May, we had the best inflation number of four years. | ||
| They're down. | ||
| Inflation's down. | ||
| But as you said, we're going to get real wage growth up, which is what happened in President Trump's first term. | ||
| President Trump's first term, hourly workers did better than supervisory workers. | ||
| The bottom 50% of household net worth went up more than the top 10%, which might not suit anybody in this room, but it was great for working Americans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So now, Mr. Secretary, you just got back from Stockholm, Sweden. | ||
| You were there meeting with the Chinese delegation about trade talks. | ||
| This is your third such meeting, I believe, with them. | ||
| Can you talk to us a little bit about what happened there, and then we'll get into kind of some of the specifics about where things go from here on? | ||
| Well, what I can tell you is I don't think it's overstating it to say that they were a little on their heels because the week before we had just done the Japanese trade deal. | ||
| Then the day before we began our talks, I know you were in Scotland with the President. | ||
| Ursula van der Lauden, president of the European Commission, came and did, you know, what's the deal of the century with the EU. | ||
| So, you know, Japan, EU, we are, I believe, meeting with the Koreans this afternoon. | ||
| So, you know, our largest trading partners, we have trade deals with. | ||
| So the Chinese who like to project strength and under this monolithic view, they were on their heels because I was like you know listen guys this is the way it is and you've got a pretty good deal going but the rest of the world is now with us and you're not going to get a special deal you're not going to get this the EU is a bigger trading partner | ||
| and the more excess manufa-I keep telling them that they have to, the Chinese have to rebalance their economy. | ||
| They have the most unbalanced, imbalanced economy in the history of the modern world. | ||
| There's 30 percent of manufacturing. | ||
| They have a current account surplus that's equivalent to two percent of global GDP. | ||
| We haven't seen that since the 1870s, 1880s when there was the British empire. | ||
| And I just said that the world's with us now because for a while it looked in April, May, like the US was alone against the world. | ||
| Now that we've done deals with our top trading partners, that we have a lot more leverage. | ||
| And as you know, nobody generates leverage like the president. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| So one of the things he told me that President Trump told me when I interviewed him in Scotland about China, because I asked him about your meetings, which were ongoing at the time when we did the interview a couple days ago. | ||
| By the way, Turnberry, fantastic property, guys, right? | ||
| If you ever get a chance, go, please. | ||
| Like it's beautiful. | ||
| They're right there on the coast. | ||
| But one of the things he said about China in particular is the goal is to get China to open up. | ||
| Did you get the sense that they're open to opening up or their economy to American goods? | ||
| They will move at a very deliberate pace. | ||
| I was in the macro economic investment business for 35 years. | ||
| And I think probably the most overused saying recently is the Ernest Hemingway saying, how did you go bankrupt slowly than quickly? | ||
| I think that with a lot of these big economies, that it's a slow process, then it'll happen quickly. | ||
| You know, I got I remember that the Japanese had the bubble burst. | ||
| They didn't want to do much about it. | ||
| Then Abe came, you know, President Trump's great friend, Prime Minister Abe came into office in 2012. | ||
| And boom, the Japanese hit the accelerator and never looked back. | ||
| So my sense is that it's not going to be a straight line that they are doing. | ||
| They have five year planning sessions. | ||
| They are meeting for the planning sessions. | ||
| It's called the five year plan. | ||
| They're doing their five year plan in September, October. | ||
| They'll announce the results of that in February. | ||
| So I encourage them that if they are going to rebalance to more of a consumer economy to make that known. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| So you mentioned the the other deals, the the EU deal. | ||
| And that happened while we were there with the president. | ||
| The the we saw the Japan deal. | ||
| We've seen deals with the Philippines, with Indonesia, with Vietnam, obviously, the United Kingdom. | ||
| Previously, that was the first | ||
| the first big one on the prime minister of the UK came right after our interview with the president literally the staff were yelling out the prime minister's gonna be here in four minutes you gotta wrap it up so the um the uh but mr. secretary the um the one of the things the president told me was that when in the previous administration last year the world leaders are telling him this that our country was dead like we were done like we were finished we were on the decline and now they're telling him we're the hottest | ||
| in the world? | ||
| I think you were asked about, you know, as a macro investor last night when you were in Stockholm, where would you invest right now? | ||
| You said the United States of America. | ||
| Your thoughts on that? | ||
| Like, is this the hottest place in the world right now? | ||
| I think not only is the hottest place in the world that we've set the conditions to really accelerate that. | ||
| So I had a very nice life in the private sector, nice office in my hometown in Charleston, South Carolina. | ||
| Reason I | ||
| came out from behind my desk was for two reasons I was alarmed by the debt levels that we were seeing the Biden administration we inherited a mess 6.7 percent deficit to GDP the highest we'd ever seen when we were at peacetime or not at war not in a recession and then the other thing that I was very worried about was this regulatory state and the amount of regulation that | ||
| was just being put in the federal register and I think that this deregulation is both a huge amount of economic friction but it's also a big tax and I think now as we're bringing down these barriers that you know with with the tax bill 100 percent depreciation permanent for equipment for the next five years you build your factory in the U.S. You can write that off 100%. | ||
| We are pushing for energy dominance. | ||
| So we're going to have abundant and cheap energy. | ||
| We've addressed, imagine this, like there's an AI czar. | ||
| When you look, when you see the interview with Mark Andreessen and Ben Hurwitz and why they migrated over to President Trump, they couldn't get the white, you know, two of the greatest venture capitalists of the generation, they couldn't get the White House, the Biden White House, to call them back on AI. | ||
| And now we have an AI czar that we are having a digital asset event. | ||
| So I think we are setting the stage for great policies, but also focusing on the jobs of the future. | ||
| So I'm super bullish on that. | ||
| And then when you deal what's fascinating for me now, is my job for 35 years as a macro investor was when policymakers met to kind of have my ear up against the door, try to figure out what was going on in the room, what they were saying, what they could do, what they would do, what they should do, and how the market would react. | ||
| Now I'm in the room and I'm thinking, okay, what can we do? | ||
| What should we do? | ||
| What's possible? | ||
| How will the market react? | ||
| How will the economy react? | ||
| And I tell you that the more I deal with the Europeans, that they've just given up. | ||
| It is a regulatory morass. | ||
| Mario Draghi, you don't have to read his, I think it's 300-page report. | ||
| The FT about two and a half months ago did a summary of the report and he came out and said that the EU internally taxes themselves 100% on services and 50% on goods. | ||
| The EU was supposed to create economic, get rid of economic friction, whether it's in finance, whether it's in technology, whether it's in energy. | ||
| All the EU wants to do is over-regulate. | ||
| It is a bunch of supernatural national bureaucrats with no industry experience sitting in Brussels, and they've just given up. | ||
| And I think now, with America, there's just nothing like the U.S. with the innovation, that we are blessed with these natural resources, I think we're going to be unstoppable. | ||
| I think the Chinese model, their economic model is starting to implode, that somehow they believe that gravity doesn't apply to them in real estate. | ||
| They're in the middle of a real estate crisis. | ||
| And I think that the rest of the world will have had it with just the Chinese pushing out these cheap goods. | ||
| Okay, so last thing on trade is that one of the things, so we had our, John Carney, our economics editor who introduced us here, ran the numbers. | ||
| Apparently, the deals that you guys have already made are close to 60% of world GDP. | ||
| Obviously, we have an August 1st deadline coming up that the President has made clear. | ||
| If the deals are not in place, then the tariffs are going to go into place even more so then. | ||
| Do you expect any 11th hour deals? | ||
| And talk to us about just how consequential this alliance that has basically come together here through these deals that the President's made is for the world economy. | ||
| So we have 18 important trading partners, 60% of GDP, and then a lot of the GDP we may not trade with. | ||
| So if I said it in Stockholm yesterday evening, that if there's not a deal by August 1, I would encourage market participants, corporate America, even the countries not to panic because you can still do a deal. | ||
| You're just going to go back to your April 2nd reciprocal tariff level. | ||
| And it may be on for three days, it may be on for three weeks, it may be on for three months. | ||
| You can continue negotiating, but back to the president creating leverage that when you, the whole world's been at 10%. | ||
| If you have not come with a good deal, if you have not moved quickly, I can tell you, jumping from 10% back to, you know, I'll pick a number, back to 34% is going to get a lot of attention. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant reinforcing a lot of what we said in the first half hour. | ||
| Very, very powerful. | ||
| Matt Ball doing a great job coming off that really amazing interview with the president over at Turnbury, President Trump's course in Scotland. | ||
| Dave Walsh is going to stick with me at the top of the hour. | ||
| We've got Joe Allen's going to come in, John Solomon, a lot to report on this, trying to stick the landing on President Trump. | ||
| I'll show you this meme really big time. | ||
| Also, on the blue slips, President Trump, I don't know, kind of went off on grassy last night. | ||
| Got to go pretty far in the woods to hit his tripwire. | ||
| I think we hit it because he just blew back on the president about the blue slips. | ||
| The blue slips are one of these structural customs and traditions of the United States Senate. | ||
| I don't think it's changing anytime soon. | ||
| And it does protect you when you're in the minority. | ||
| But the Democrats use it far too much. | ||
| This is the reason they have HABA now as another interim for 120 days. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| On a 3% Wednesday, Scott just sat there. | ||
| Scott Besson told you, was it? | ||
| Peace deals, trade deals, tax deals. | ||
| How about that bingo, bango, bungo? | ||
| That's he get to a three handling the economy. | ||
| The re-Americanization of the workforce. | ||
| He hit the most important number in the ADP report. | ||
| American citizens are getting jobs. | ||
| American citizens. | ||
| And the private sector growing faster than the public sector. | ||
| I think there's some lessons here. | ||
| Some pattern recognition. | ||
| What a morning to take us out with the right stuff and tee us up for the second hour of the war room. |
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