Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday announced the creation of a new “affordability czar” and a separate “affordability council” to address high consumer prices.
Speaking on CBS News’s Face the Nation, Bessent described the affordability czar as “someone who picks the five or eight areas where this administration can make a big difference for working-class Americans.” The Treasury secretary did not go into specifics on the new affordability council.
While those steps to address high prices are still in the works, Bessent defended the work the Trump administration has done in a little over five weeks, pointing to declining interest rates in particular.
“I think President Trump said that he’ll own the economy in six or 12 months, but I can tell you that we are working to get these prices down every day, but it took four years to get us here, and we’ve had five weeks so interest rates are down. That’s a very good start toward housing affordability, toward auto affordability, and we are tackling this,” he said.
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Also a plus for the new administration is new inflation data released last week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed a decline of a tenth of a percentage point in the month of January, from 2.6% to 2.5%.
Meanwhile, core inflation, which does not include food and energy prices, rose 2.6% on an annual basis. The consumer price index also rose to 3% in January, which is above the Federal Reserve’s preferred 2% level.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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