Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to meet with Chinese officials in the coming days to discuss trade. Bessent says negotiations will begin on Saturday and expects a focus on trade fairness rather than a full decoupling.
StoneX senior adviser Jon Hilsenrath joins Catalysts to explain how internal divisions among President Trump's advisers could shape the direction of US trade policy.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Benson saying here on Capitol Hill that negotiations with China will begin on Saturday. He also said in his interview with Fox that he expects there to be not a full decoupling, but rather a focus on fairness when it comes to trade policy. John, what does that tell you about what these trade negotiations could look like in their finality? Does that signal to you that maybe there's going to be a sector specific approach versus that broad, you know, triple digit tariff that could signal more of that decoupling that Besson was rebuffing in his interview?
Yeah, you know, I I I am constantly going back to what happened in 2018 and 2019 during the president's first term for a map of how things play out. And what we saw in 2018 and 19 was pretty intense competition among the president's own advisors, this competition of rivals, where you had people like Peter Navarro, uh, who wanted to take a very aggressive stance, uh, on tariffs. And then you have the Treasury Secretary at the time, Stephen Mnuchin, who was more inclined to negotiate. And you got different signals on different days, uh, and and different advisors kind of got to the president on different days. And we really were in this state of constant limbo and tension, trying to figure out who among the rivals would win out to get the president's full support and backing. And we saw that again in April, the reciprocal tariffs looked very clearly like the work of Peter Navarro, who's a very strong, uh, anti anti trade wing of the president's advisors. And then you have Scott Benson who wants to negotiate. So I think that's what we're going to get over the next few months. It's going to be a competition, not only among the trade partners to get a good deal, but among the president's own advisors, uh, to win their day in these internal arguments about how soft or hard to be on America's trade rivals.
