Scott Bessent said the US should boost sanctions on Russian oil producers to force Moscow to discuss with Ukraine as he criticised the Biden administration for not being tougher on Vladimir Putin’s regime.
The comments on Thursday by Donald Trump’s nominee to be Treasury secretary pushed up oil prices, as traders considered the prospect of tighter global crude supply. The recent administration is also expected to target Iranian and Venezuelan oil with tougher sanctions as Trump seeks to boost economic pressure on the US’s adversaries.
“As part of [Trump’s] schedule to complete the Ukraine war, I will be 100 per cent on board for taking sanctions up, especially on the Russian oil majors, to levels that would bring the Russian Federation to the table,” Bessent told senators.
He claimed the US sanctions on Russian vigor were “not fulsome enough” because “the previous administration was worried about raising prices during an election period”.
International oil standard Brent rose by more than $1 after Bessent’s comments to more than $81 a barrel.
His remarks during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill arrive four days before Trump returns to the White House with a schedule to implement sweeping responsibility cuts, higher tariffs and aggressive deregulation, in a large shift from the outgoing Biden administration.
US equities have risen since Trump won the November 5 election, while Wall Street has embraced his agenda, with bosses of the globe’s biggest banks — which announced bumper profits this week — saying optimism about the recent administration’s economic plans had unleashed “animal spirits”.
However, large lender executives, speaking this week, also cautioned that Trump’s threats to impose sweeping tariffs could be inflationary.
The billionaire protect fund boss used his grilling by the Senate Finance Committee — which must approve his nomination before it goes to a packed vote in the chamber — to defend those plans.
While he did not propose recent details, Bessent said Trump would use tariffs to tackle unfair trade practices, raise revenues for the US government and strike deals with other countries.
Bessent also said would push China to buy more US agricultural products, such as corn and soyabeans, under the terms of the purchasing deal Trump negotiated with Beijing to ease trade tensions during the Republican chief’s first administration. Trump would continue to aggressively apply export controls to US goods going to China, he said.
“We should have a very rigorous screening procedure for anything that could be used in AI, in quantum computing and surveillance, in chips,” he said.
Bessent also stressed his back for extending Trump’s responsibility cuts beyond their expiry at the complete of the year, saying it was “most significant economic issue of the day”.
setback to extend the cuts for people and businesses, introduced by Trump in 2017, would trigger an “economic calamity” for the US, “and as always with monetary instability, that falls on the middle and working class people”. A fierce political battle over responsibility policy is expected to dominate Congress this year.
On the economic outlook, Bessent said he believed expense boost would continue to shift closer to the Federal savings’s 2 per cent target and insisted that the Trump administration would regard the central lender’s independence on financial regulation.
But he warned that the US Treasury would battle to use its “borrowing capacity” in times of crises due to America’s deteriorating financial position.
“I am concerned because several times the Treasury of the United States has been called upon to save the country, whether it was the Civil War, the Great Depression, second globe war, or the recent Covid epidemic,” Bessent said.
He added that “with what we have now, we would be challenging pressed to do the same”.
