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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he expects the U.S. to end the year with a better-than-expected 3% gross domestic product (GDP) growth.
Bessent appeared Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” and was asked by host Margaret Brennan about whether President Donald Trump was wrong to predict this spring that Americans may buy “two dolls instead of the 30 dolls” and that “maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they normally would.”
“The economy has been better than we thought,” Bessent replied.
“We’ve had the 4- 4% GDP growth in a couple of quarters. We’re going to finish the year, despite the Schumer shutdown, with 3% real GDP growth,” the treasury secretary added.
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The U.S. economy has been volatile in 2025 amid increases in tariffs and changes in immigration policy.
First-quarter GDP showed a contraction of 0.6%, caused in part by a surge of imports to get ahead of tariffs taking effect.
The second quarter saw real GDP rise at an annual rate of 3.8% in the April through June period, which the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) noted mainly reflected a decrease in imports.
With that data, the U.S. economy had an annualized growth rate of about 1.6% in the first half of 2025.
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The federal government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 15 delayed the BEA’s release of third-quarter GDP data, with the initial estimate delayed until Dec. 23.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow estimate of real GDP in the third quarter projected that, as of Dec. 5, third-quarter GDP increased 3.5%. That would leave GDP for the first three quarters of 2025 at about 2.2%.
Brennan also asked Bessent about polling showing that Americans disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the economy and issues like inflation, and whether the administration needs to show that it feels the pain of Americans struggling economically.
TRUMP CALLS AFFORDABILITY ‘A DEMOCRAT SCAM’ AS INFLATION CONCERNS PERSIST NATIONWIDE
The treasury secretary criticized the media coverage of the rise in inflation during the Biden administration and said that “affordability has two components: there is inflation, and then there is real incomes. Real incomes are up about 1% and what we’re not going to do is say that Americans don’t know what they’re feeling.”
“Democrats created scarcity, whether it was in energy or overregulation, that we are now seeing this affordability problem, and I think next year we’re going to move on to prosperity,” Bessent said.
“I said that the Biden administration created the worst inflation in 50 years, and maybe for working Americans, the worst inflation of all time. And we have pulled that number down,” he added.
The consumer price index (CPI), a popular inflation measurement, fell to 2.3% year over year in April, the lowest reading since 2021 and well below the four-decade high of 9.1% reached in June 2022.
However, inflation has rebounded in recent months and reached 3% in September, the same level it was at in January.
