Trump’s New Treasury Secretary is a HOME RUN

(00:00.824)

So we got ourselves a pretty impressive treasury secretary. You want to call him the anti-Yellen, call him the anti-Yellen. Why is it the anti-Yellen? Yellen, well, has never had a real job in her life. When I’m saying real job, all I know teaching is a real job. She worked in some universities. She never worked in the private sector.

Janet Yellen’s always been someone that is hovered around academia and politics and the Federal Reserve and rubbing elbows with the Washington DC types. I actually looked up, I actually looked up Janet Yellen’s academic contributions. What she actually did, because she’s an economist, right, and is supposed to do studies, studies.

Hold on one second. Here it is. Janet Yellen’s academic studies. One of them was basically a study that determined that if you pay kids, kids rather than paying the minimum wage, if you pay them a little bit above the prevailing wage, they will actually be more productive.

No, again, she actually got paid, she got research dollars to actually conduct this research. Any person with half a brain that runs a business understands that concept completely. You wonder what our other study was? It had to do with the fact that why are there so many out of wedlock births in the country? Why has that changed? And gee, they came up with the idea that it was technology.

you know, type of technology, more contraception and greater access to abortion. So that’s Janet Yellen’s big contributions to economics and master the obvious crap. But anyway, let’s talk a little bit about Scott here. is a student of economic history. And one of the things that he said that struck me

(02:24.686)

is he adheres and believes to the same type of risk management philosophy that I have. He is an adherent to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ideas when it comes to risk management and understanding that, you know, if things look…

like they’re all wonderful and great and a trend is a certain way and this is the way it was in the past. It means absolutely nothing. Black swans, things can happen out of nowhere and he’s very, very good when it comes to risk management. Good, I think, is the understatement that’s out there. Taleb’s philosophy is quite frankly, I don’t know of any better and we adhere to them.

and obviously Scott does as well. He feels right now that he wants to step out. He wants to help grow the economy. He understands that budget deficits are completely nonsensical. Our indebtedness is nonsensical. And one of the ways that we can do this is we can grow our way out of it and we can also cut costs.

He said his first interview following his selection, he wants to deliver on Trump’s tax cut pledges, even eliminating tax on tips, making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, social security benefits, no more taxes and overtime pay. He also wants to, we talked about tariffs. We’ll get into that in a bit, but he also talked about cutting spending.

He also wants to maintain the status of the US dollar as a world’s reserve currency. Actually, foreign policy is going to help with that too. We get out of this, you know, constant sanctions, wars, all this other stuff. That’ll be helpful also. His policy calls 333 and three arrows basically, including cutting the budget deficit to 3 % of GDP.

(04:47.95)

I must do this by 2028, spurring GDP growth of 3 % through deregulation and producing additional 3 million barrels of oil or equivalent a day. Again, getting government spending out and under control. wants to basically freeze non-defense discretionary spending, wants to…

get rid of all the nonsensical subsidies for electric vehicles and other parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which are ridiculous. And again, that’s a start. Tariffs. He likened tariffs to a loaded gun. Tariff gun, if you will. You wanna keep the tariff gun loaded, but you don’t wanna use it. And if you do use it, you wanna use it sparingly. Again, even…

Howard Lutnick, was also up for Treasury Secretary, talked about this and now, you know, take Donald Trump seriously, but not literally when it comes to tariffs. There was a great debate this past year with Stephen Moore. No, who was it with? I’m going to forget it was at the Soho Forum and that was Art Laffer. Art Laffer and it was someone else on the libertarian front. And Art Laffer made the same point, says, listen,

Trump is threatening tariffs. He’s not going to put all of these things through. He gave a speech last month that was titled, the International Economic System Great Again. And he argued for increasing tariffs on national security grounds and to induce other countries to lower trade barriers with the United States. something we’ve talked about for some time. Trade deals should be on one page. That’s it.

I don’t know. I never understood why we need thousands and thousands of pages in trade deals. I won’t put tariffs on your stuff. You don’t put tariffs on mine. I won’t subsidize certain industries. You won’t subsidize yours. Let’s go to work. Really that simple. Not that difficult. Not that complicated, quite frankly. He criticized trade policy with China that since again enriching Wall Street.

(07:05.862)

weakening domestic industrial might and failing to lead to Chinese economic reform. Called for tariffs resemble the Treasury Department sanctions program as tool to promote US interests abroad. And he actually was open to removing tariffs from countries that undertake structural reforms and voice support for a fair trade bloc for allies with common security interests and reciprocal approaches to tariffs. Again, I think that’s great.

no problem with that at all. But again, it has to make sense. None of these, you know, cloak and dagger type stuff agreements that you can’t let anybody look at. They sit in a room. Remember the TPP deal? You couldn’t even take a picture of it. You couldn’t photocopy it. You couldn’t take notes when you went and take a look at the deal. It’s a damn trade deal for crying out loud. Why not? Anyway, again, free trade is desirable. again,

I like his approach to risk, pointing that out and the fact you do not let risk lead to ruin. tackling our national debt and growing the economy is going to be a boom for all. It is. If we can get this done, I’ve talked about wasted talent often here. We’re wasting it.

We’re wasting it because guess we’re flushing money down the toilet in ridiculous interest payments. And it makes no sense. It really doesn’t. And it’s something that we can handle. You can work hand in hand with Vivek and Elon. Again, these are all ifs. Throwing them out there. Okay, I’m being optimistic at this point in time. Get these things done. I think many of us have a smile on our face moving forward. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.