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Scott Bessent
Treasury Secretary, US Treasury

FULL INTERVIEW: Scott Bessent Joins Larry Kudlow for G20 Fireside Chat on Global Economy | AC1G

📅 Sep 01, 2026 DRM News 29 MIN 49756 VIEWS 49 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Former National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow interviewed U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a fireside chat at the G20 finance meeting in Asheville. The U.S.-hosted gathering brought together finance ministers and central bank governors for discussions on global growth, investment and economic cooperation. For more details, watch our story and subscribe to our channel, DRM News. #ScottBessent #LarryKudlow #G20 #G202026 #USTreasury #Asheville #NorthCarolina #GlobalEconomy #EconomicPolicy #FinanceMinisters #CentralBanks #USNews #WorldEconomy #DRMNews Scott Bessent Joins La...

What Scott Bessent said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, discussed the US economy's strength, citing re-accelerating growth, flat inflation expectations, and the US as an AI superpower with computing power rising from 60% in 2025 to 80% by 2028. He highlighted the capex boom from 100% expensing, citing Boeing's factory expansion in Charleston, and noted energy production up 1.6-2.2 million barrels per day since inauguration. Bessent praised private sector integration of AI at the G20, wage gains for the bottom 25%, and Abenomics as a model. He advocated de-risking supply chains, aiming to bring 35% of advanced semiconductor production back to the US by decade's end. On Iran, he detailed military and financial pressure, including new Treasury authorities, a $1.8 billion bank sanction, and plans to freeze regime assets, asserting the regime is 'demised'.

Key takeaways

  1. US computing power will rise from 60% in 2025 to 80% of global compute by 2028.
  2. Treasury has five new authorities targeting Iran across digital assets, aviation, and maritime.
  3. A Dubai bank funneled over $1.8 billion to Iran and was shut down using a Patriot Act authority.
  4. The US aims to bring 35% of advanced semiconductor production back by the end of the decade.
  5. Energy production is up 1.6-2.2 million barrels per day since President Trump's inauguration.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
60% US share of global computing power in 2025 metric 1:05
80% US share of global computing power by 2028 guidance 1:05
1.6 or 2.2 million barrels a day Increase in US energy production since inauguration metric 6:36
4.7% Wage increase for bottom 25% of income ladder metric 8:21
35% Target for advanced semiconductor production back in US guidance 17:03
$1.8 billion Amount funneled to Iran by a Dubai bank branch metric 21:29
85 or 90% Portion of Iran's factories destroyed that can rebuild military metric 20:28
2 million Iranian currency exchange rate to the dollar metric 21:03

Chapters

  1. 0:00US economic growth and AI superpower
  2. 4:42Capex boom and manufacturing jobs
  3. 6:36Energy production and exports
  4. 7:11Private sector AI integration at G20
  5. 8:21Wage gains and government job decline
  6. 11:03Abenomics and Western Hemisphere reforms
  7. 13:58Economic statecraft and de-risking
  8. 19:23Iran sanctions and blockade
  9. 27:16Iran regime demise and future

Questions asked in this interview

3
  1. 3:50Now, as you just said, let's go back to the one big beautiful bill. All right?
  2. 19:23How does it look to you right now?
  3. 25:29Are you getting the cooperation from our allies that you seek?
Larry Kudlow 0:00 ↗
You've been trying to get that out there a number of times. Media doesn't like to talk about the successes of the American economy, but I want to begin with that because to me that's the headline story.
Scott Bessent 0:14 ↗
Good, Larry, and thanks for coming down. This is a great part, great part of the world. Blue Ridge Mountains out the window here. Asheville had a terrible tragedy about two years ago, Hurricane Helene, and these are resilient people. I grew up coming up here, as you said, have a house about an hour away. And to be able to showcase both this part of the country—and I hope all the G20 attendees will come back, I hope the people who are seeing Asheville and western North Carolina around the world will come visit. And Larry, it's exactly as you said. If we look at the composition of the bond yields, inflation expectations are flat to down, right?
And this is a growth story. Growth, I believe, is re-accelerating, that we've had some very good discussions here over the past few days, and everyone agreed that growth has been better than they thought it would have been given the Iran conflict. Now, you know, everyone is always cautious going forward, but growth has been better. And as you said, the US sits at a very special place in the world because we are the AI superpower and we are pulling away. The amount of compute that the US has relative to global compute, we're going to go up from about call it 60% in 2025; by 2028, the US will have 80% of global computing power here, which is just extraordinary.
And you know, as you said, the president's policies have laid the groundwork for this economy. So we have regulatory certainty. The president tasked this administration with cutting the regulatory burden, and that's part of what we're talking about here today with the G20, with our with the 20 most important economies in the world and other countries that we've invited because we view them as systemically important and allies that come with us and grow because regulatory certainty, tax certainty, and energy certainty—because the US is also the world's energy superpower. We are now exporting energy to the rest of the world. So, I don't think that we are in any kind of a dire situation. And as I said yesterday, the US bond market has been the best-performing bond market. What happens over a month doesn't matter, but for August, it was. And since President Trump came into office, since January 20th, 2025, it's been the best-performing bond market among major countries in the world.
Larry Kudlow 3:26 ↗
And the best-performing stock market. And stock market, I say this all the time, profits are the mother's milk of stocks. Profits drive the economy. Front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, they finally ran a profit story. I've been waiting for this. The business newspaper of record finally ran it. Front page story.
Scott Bessent 3:47 ↗
Well, it's more of a features paper now.
Larry Kudlow 3:50 ↗
And it's not the Main Street Journal. But profits year-on-year—hang on a second. Profits are up 53% for the S&P 500. Profits per share, 53%. Now, I read some of the economists on Wall Street, they're looking for future earnings of 25% year-on-year. Now, as you just said, let's go back to the one big beautiful bill. All right? You have 100% depreciation, you write off your expensing. So, we are in a capex boom. Nothing like it around the rest of the world. We are in a capex boom: machinery, equipment, buildings, of course, the AI construction. You did a tweet, what was it, 105,000 jobs, goods-producing jobs year-to-date. That was a very important tweet.
Scott Bessent 4:42 ↗
And Larry, too, the preamble for the manufacturing jobs are construction jobs, right? So we are seeing, thanks to the tax bill, 100% expensing on equipment, 100% expensing on factories, and 100% expensing on structures. We are having a capex boom in factories, and the precondition for that is construction jobs. My hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, Boeing is doing a 50% increase in their factory there, which produces the Dreamliners. That will be a thousand great-paying jobs, but before that, they're construction jobs.
Larry Kudlow 5:22 ↗
Yes. And so we were seeing this construction boom. And I don't know if you saw the other day, the construction unions came out and pushed back against the data centers.
Scott Bessent 5:32 ↗
The Yeah. The data centers. The construction unions came back and pushed back against the data center backlash, and they said we will go after anyone who attacks these because these are great projects.
Larry Kudlow 5:48 ↗
Manufacturing orders, okay, non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft, last 3 months, 16.2%. Shipments, last three months, 16.7%. Backlogs, 9.2%. Year-on-year, 13% increase. Okay? We've never seen anything like this before. So here's my point: tax incentives work. That's, boy. Tax incentives provide growth. Deregulation provides growth. Drill, baby, drill. We are now, according to the Energy Department, at 13.8 million barrels per day, on our way probably to 14.5 to 15 million barrels next year. That's from the Energy Department. They have a little thing, too.
Scott Bessent 6:36 ↗
Well, Larry, the other thing, too, is that I had my 3-3-3 program, and on the energy portion, it was the 3 million barrels per day of crude equivalents. And right now, if we think about crude, nat gas, all the other adjacent fuels, we are already up about 1.6 or 2.2 million barrels a day since the president's inauguration. So we're well on our way.
Larry Kudlow 7:09 ↗
With massive exports.
Scott Bessent 7:11 ↗
With massive exports. And the other thing, too, here, Larry, is that this AI boom, for the first time, we've had private sector participants at a G20 yesterday.
Larry Kudlow 7:27 ↗
Nice.
Scott Bessent 7:27 ↗
And we had pharma executives and manufacturing executives. And more than talk about their businesses, they talked about how they are integrating AI into them. And it was fascinating to see the ecosystems that are developing, the productivity, the higher level of precision manufacturing both across their supply chains and their customer bases. And I think that we're just at the beginning of this. And as you said, this is where the jobs are created. We have seen a decline in government jobs since the president came in.
Larry Kudlow 8:06 ↗
370,000 decline, and private jobs up just about 900,000. It's a restructuring—a restructuring of the Biden big government socialism, which is promoting growth.
Scott Bessent 8:21 ↗
And that's why, one of the reasons we're seeing the bottom 25% on the income ladder have seen the highest wage increases, 4.7% wage increases. Just like the president did it again, just like he did in his first term, because the private sector is what increases real wage growth. So we are seeing this boom, and we brought in these private sector executives to talk to the group about what they are seeing. There's also in Chapel Hill going on the tech track, which Commerce and the White House Technology Office are running, and they're also showcasing our great tech executives. The president took a group of executives to Beijing for the state visit, and it really is that the US, we want to set the guardrails, create the incentives, and then let our private sector go, because that is where a nation's wealth is created.
Larry Kudlow 9:31 ↗
So with all this, I just want to make a generic point that I think is very important here. Here in the United States, we're operating a free enterprise economy. This is free-market capitalism. It is producing with incentives and choice and competition. We do not need a socialist economy. My good friend Newt Gingrich calls it big government socialism. We had a dose of that in the prior four years, and we had virtually no growth and a 21% cumulative inflation rate. We are still feeling the hangover from that cumulative inflation rate. That was a dose of big government socialism. There's a lot of loose talk in the elections about socialism. It doesn't work. Free enterprise works. That's why the numbers are very important to back up the general points on the economic boom. That's why I've taken some time on this to make sure that you get your message out. We don't need socialism. And I think also Trump's policies are an example for the rest of the world because they should grow as rapidly as we are growing. Growth solves a lot of problems. But growth comes from free enterprise and market competition, not from a statist.
Scott Bessent 11:03 ↗
And look, if I look back, Japan implemented Abenomics in 2012, 2013, and one of the most important aspects of that was the deregulatory aspect, was the corporate sector getting more efficient in the private sector jobs. And as I've said over the past few days, I think Abenomics was a restructure in the economy, a reflationary program, and now I think Japan can sit back and enjoy the benefits of that.
Larry Kudlow 11:37 ↗
I was talking last night at dinner. We're seeing the people that finance ministers I was sitting next to at your head table. So we're seeing free enterprise move through this hemisphere. Very interesting. A lot of overturning of the left and socialism moving back towards free-market economics. Argentina is probably the best example, but by far not the only example. I sat next to the finance minister of Poland, he was talking about the reforms. I sat next to the finance minister of Italy, who was moaning and groaning that he can't get his reforms through, but he had the right idea. We're seeing this. I'd like to see more of it in Europe. I think Europe is too sclerotic. I think it needs a dose of deregulation, probably needs lower tax rates as well. But my point here is, with all this talk about socialism, I don't know where it comes from. We have a prosperous free enterprise economy. We go into the elections, it's going to go beyond the elections. These are such important changes, and it works. The point is the theory is no good if the facts don't back it up. What I'm saying is the facts do back it up.
Scott Bessent 12:54 ↗
Look, I agree, and we've seen some great examples. I think we have a generational opportunity in the Western Hemisphere. As you said, it was led by Argentina and the reforms there. Everyone said it couldn't be done, and now we are seeing the inflation drop, the change in economic circumstances. And Larry, what I thought was most interesting, when you talk about socialism here in the US, when we look at the demographic of those voters, they are overeducated and under-earning. So these are underachievers who are jealous of those who want to go and work every day. And if you were to dissect the last election that President Milei had, that it was the poorest segment of society and the young people who came out and voted for him.
Larry Kudlow 13:47 ↗
That's right.

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APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Bessent, S. (2026, September 1). FULL INTERVIEW: Scott Bessent Joins Larry Kudlow for G20 Fireside Chat on Global Economy | AC1G [Interview transcript]. DRM News. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1315404/

MLA

Scott Bessent. "FULL INTERVIEW: Scott Bessent Joins Larry Kudlow for G20 Fireside Chat on Global Economy | AC1G." DRM News, 1 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1315404/.

BibTeX
@misc{bessent2026_1315404,
  author       = {Scott Bessent},
  title        = {FULL INTERVIEW: Scott Bessent Joins Larry Kudlow for G20 Fireside Chat on Global Economy | AC1G},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, DRM News. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {sep},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1315404/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}