U.S. President Donald Trump with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 20, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
Economics and public policy professor at the University of Michigan, Justin Wolfers, sent the host and an CNBC economics reporter into chuckles describing President Donald Trump policies, particularly on fuel prices, as a kind of Trump two-step.
Speaking to MS NOW's Stephanie Ruhle, CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman said bond market participants aren't happy with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for his recent statement that he's "The House," as in the dealer in a casino.
"Most of the people who I talked to in the bond market kind of laughed at that, because he is specifically not the house, unless he has a very large cache of cash, which he doesn't really have, and the effort of taking on the $40 trillion bond market, it requires a lot of money that Bessent didn't have," said Steve Liesman. "So he said that. And most of the people who trade these bonds and have large trillion-dollar portfolios of them didn't think much of the comment."
"And of course you could see how much they thought of the comment by what you just reported, which is what happened to bond yields," he continued as the screen showed early morning market numbers dropping. "I don't see the market reacting very much to his comment today because, frankly, they didn't think the Treasury was going to do or could do very much about it."
It comes on the heels of another week of rising oil prices, and Wolfers sees Trump's latest plan as the same old thing, just dressed up differently.
"So, let's actually start by asking the question: is there any there-there. So back in March, in fact, the G7 had promised 400 million barrels," Wolfers began. "And so more or less we hadn't gotten the full 400. We got in about 320, which means across the G7 there were 80 million short. They just announced 100 million. So most of this announcement is, we are going to clean up and do what we announced previously. As far as I can tell."
"Second thing I should add, this is actually a very, very small amount. It sounds like a lot if you, you know, a hundred million barrels. I couldn't fit that in my living room. But relative to how much the world uses, it's actually very, very small amount," he explained. "So I think this has turned out to be something of a PR coup, which is I've been asked about it on every network."
"It looks like the president's doing something heredoing something here," Wolfers continued. "It's below the surface that it becomes something else. "It's the old Trump administration bait-and-switch, which is announce first, act later. And what you've already announced, re-announced. And then pretend that's new economic policy and pretend you're doing something about the issue. Look, the issue is pretty straightforward. It's the Strait of Hormuz. It's closed, okay."