Venture capitalist and “All-In” podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya told SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly on her show Friday that the Trump administration is going to have an uphill battle tackling the U.S. debt due to prior actions by the Biden administration.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent became President Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary on Jan. 27 after passing through the Senate with bipartisan support and saying he would help the president bring the “new economic golden age.” On “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Kelly brought up Democrats’ pushback against Trump’s plan to clear government waste. She said some people are already speculating that the U.S. budget will remain the same despite the cuts. Trump is making cuts with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“We’re in a really difficult spot. So I think it’s important for your listeners and viewers to know this. The last couple of years, the Biden administration and specifically Biden and [Janet] Yellen did one thing that I hope no government afterwards ever does, which is they were effectively speculating on rates,” Palihapitiya said. “What they did was, you know, the Treasury’s job is to finance the government, right?”
“Their job is to go into the bond market, sell bonds, use that money and redirect it to HHS, to Social Security, to defense, wherever. They financed it with all of this short-term paper,” Palihapitiya added. “Part of it was they believed that inflation would be in check and interest rates in the future would fall. So whatever happened, we would be able to go back into the markets and borrow later for cheaper. It turned out that was an enormously incorrect assumption, and they should not have made that decision.”
Former President Joe Biden and his White House staff said the U.S. economy fared well during his four years, yet inflation hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022, impacting businesses and consumers. While the Federal Reserve’s target is 2%, the central bank announced in December 2024 that it would lower its federal funds target range to 4.25%–4.50%, down from its September target range of 5.25%–5.50%.
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“So today, what Trump and Bessent have to do is extremely difficult. They have about 10 trillion dollars. So call it, you know, 25% to 30% of our total debt we have to refinance in the next six to nine months,” Palihapitiya said. “We’re doing it against the backdrop where now inflation is ticking back up, and rates are ticking back up.”
Palihapitiya said that the House’s budget bill could cause a “problem.”
“There’s the Senate version, which is super-light, and it says let’s just deal with border security and the military. Then there’s what, sort of, Trump has asked for, which is the House version, which is this, ‘one big, beautiful bill.’ The problem is those two things are on a collision course, and the big bill may be a little bit too early in the sense that, to exactly your point, we don’t know how bad the situation is,” Palihapitiya said.
“If Bessent goes into the market and gets clubbed over the head and all of a sudden we have 10 trillion dollars that we have to borrow at five or five and a half percent, I think it’s going to be really bad for the U.S. economy, in which case there will be no choice except to make very deep cuts in a broad-based way,” Palihapitiya added.
To help the U.S. economy, Trump on Thursday announced what he said was the “Fair and Reciprocal Plan,” which will seek to “correct long-standing imbalances in international trade and ensure fairness across the board.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/YouTube/”The Megyn Kelly Show”)
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