welcome back here's a look at where markets ended the week after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged but Chairman Jay Powell signaled two rate cuts this year treasury Secretary Scott Besset also telling me this week that the economy is healthy and he sees no reason for a recession this as President Trump is touting new tariffs in a post on Truth Social writing "April 2nd is liberation day in America." Of course April 2nd is when the reciprocal tariffs will come but results of a new Fox News poll show only 28% of those surveyed believe tariffs
are going to be helpful and help the US economy while 53% say they think they will hurt joining me now is White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hasset kevin great to have you this weekend thank you for being here and what do you want to say to those American citizens uh to convince them that these tariffs ultimately will be beneficial in the end right the only thing that we need to do to be convinced that the tariffs are going to work is to just look at the data that we already have so what's been
going on is the president has promised that there's going to be tariffs in April and what's happened is ahead of April already in February we're seeing a massive explosion in industrial production here in the US in fact we just got data this week that said that auto production in February was up 8.5% that's not an annual rate that's 8 and a half% in a single month to put that in perspective under uh Joe Biden's failed policies it dropped 7.8% in an entire year last year and so what's happening is that domestic production is advancing at
a rapid rapid rate and what that's doing is it's putting more money in people's pockets because they've got jobs and they've got high-paying auto jobs and so the idea that the tariffs are going to be a negative for the economy is something that's pushed by the mainstream media to people and certainly it's going to affect their sentiment until they see the actions of the people the economic actors that are responding to the tariffs and so if you watch the data you're going to have really really wonderful things to celebrate so we have to wait and
watch but I guess Kevin we are now entering what's called pre-announcement season where we hear pre-announcements from corporations who are about to report their first quarter earnings the quarter is almost over and this week we saw FedEx plummet fedex saying that uh the parcel delivery company is lowering its fullear guidance for a third consecutive quarter they're citing inflation and uncertain demand for shipments because of the uncertainty around tariffs so what do you want to say to some of these companies like a FedEx or even Nike nike also uh worried about tariffs it's obviously getting products
from China and you know we may see these companies be forced to raise prices so what about that the pre-announcement season seems to be getting in an ugly way kevin well I there going to be a lot of of really big positive stories in earning seasons as well but the thing to think about the data and and this would be something with regard to FedEx is uh Maria I remember you came down to Washington for the inauguration right do you remember how cold it was it was crazy cold and so there so in January and
February there was unseasonally cold weather and then an unseasonally unseasonably bad flu season and all the data releases talk about the January and February which we by the way more or less inherited from Joe Biden because our policies weren't even in place then uh and and so I think that there will be perhaps some negative uh earning surprises for people who had to move stuff around like FedEx in a season where there was really really bad weather and lots and lots of flu uh but the fundamentals of the economy are super strong we're seeing industrial
production skyrocket like the number this week is the highest ever maria look you also have companies wondering if they're going to be the next company to face a government contract that is being eliminated you saw what happened to Accenture but that brings me to the Doge cuts and you and your colleagues looking under every rock to try to figure out where the waste fraud and abuse is what have you learned Kevin yeah I got to say that as the National Economic Council director one of my jobs is to coordinate the economic policy activities of the
economic cabinet agencies and I've been meeting having regular lunches with the cabinet secretaries and going into what's happening with them and I just met with Kelly Laughler at the Small Business Administration yesterday or the day before and uh what we were looking at was just all the bad loans that the Biden people were shoveling out the door and there were really incredible horror stories of big million dollar loans going to people who are more than 100 years old and million-dollar loans going to people who are less than 10 years old and not even you know
any attempt to figure out whether the loan could ever be paid back and and so the Biden administration stopped looking at the loans and and thinking whether like a local bank might be willing to fund that thing which was historically what they would do in the small business administration there's a complete mess which Kelly is way ahead of the curve cleaning up but everywhere we look you know if you think of your model of Joe Biden is he wasn't all there uh well that's the model you should have of everybody who was running one of
his cabinet agencies they weren't all there and the thing just ran a muck and so there's a heck of a lot to clean up but what it means it's really good news because we're cleaning it up and it's going to end up making it so the taxpayers waste way less money than they have been on on things that we don't even know what they were and instead we're going to do it we're going to spend money on the things that we need to spend money on and we're going to give people big tax cuts with
what's left over well I mean it's incredible to me Kevin that even in the social security roles we found all of those people well Elon Musk and his team found you know all of those people who claim to be 200 years old 150 years old they're still on the social security roles now we don't know if they were actually receiving money but they may very well have been eligible for all of the benefits of social security yeah they were getting they were getting small business loans these people and and so it's one of the things
that we started a process yesterday i want the taxpayers to know under the direction of the president we've started a process where we at the National Economic Council are going to coordinate all the cabinet agencies to see if the same person who's hundreds of years old getting social security is the person who's hundreds of years old who's getting a small business loan and is hundreds of years old getting loans from the EPA for green this and that uh because we think that there's going to be a heck of a lot of overlap of this fraud
and I think in the end there'll probably be referrals to the Justice Department about all this unbelievable well that sounds right referrals in other words criminal referrals to the DOJ sure sure that would be my expectation kevin real quick before you go um given that we are seeing some expectations that we're in a slowdown the consumer slowing down do you have any expectations that we will see a recession this year do you worry about that slowdown you know I get paid to worry but the data that we have in hand are really strong uh the
consumption numbers are still positive for the first quarter the capital spending numbers are through the roof it's a it's a booming capital spending sector and so my current number is about two two and a half for the first quarter which is lower than we're going to see in the rest of the year when Trump policies are in place but a metric of a sort of not so bad hangover from the terrible Biden policies all right we will leave it there Kevin always a pleasure thanks so much thanks for
