Banking and Finance Law Daily Wrap Up, FINANCIAL STABILITY—Treasury Secretary Bessent delivers remarks at the Economic Club of New York, (Mar 10, 2025)

By Sherri M. Schroeder, J.D.

In his speech, he outlined the Treasury Department’s “three critical pillars of President Trump’s America First agenda”—deregulating the financial sector, tariffs, and using sanctions to shape foreign policy.

In remarks delivered at the Economic Club of New York, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discussed three top Treasury Department priorities or what he terms the “three critical pillars of President Trump’s America First agenda.” “America First is about more than just domestic or international policy, more than just economic policy and national security policy,” stated Bessent. “It is a holistic program that serves the goal of improving the lives of every American.”

First, Bessent addressed deregulating the financial sector to accelerate the “re-privatization” of the economy. According to Bessent, the Trump administration “aims to make financial regulation more efficient, effective, and appropriately tailored.” According to him, the “regulatory overreach of the past few years in pursuit of political agendas has missed material risk, stymied growth, and squashed innovation.” Bessent promised to use the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the President’s Working Group on Financial Matters to drive change in the country’s regulatory environment and to fundamentally refocus supervision priorities.

“Regulations should serve to ensure the safe and soundness of U.S. banks, drive affordability across goods and services and facilitate economic growth,” stated Bessent. “And we are going to accomplish this by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our financial sector to underwrite and finance domestic activity. De-leveraging the public sector and re-leveraging the private sector begin and end with smartly reinvigorating our regulated financial institutions.”

Next, Bessent discussed the Treasury’s international economic policy goals and how the tariffs announced by President Trump aid those goals. Noting that President Trump’s view of the world as “inter-linkages that can be reordered to advance the interest of the American people” is “contrary to the last several decades, when other countries acted to advance their own interest, while our policy makers largely forgot about the tradeoff of unconstrained trade misalignment,” Bessent said that this system is unsustainable. According to Bessent, “[i]nternational economic relations that do not work for the American people must be re-examined,” and tariffs are the tool to accomplish this.

“This is what tariffs are designed to address – leveling the playing field such that the international trading system begins to reward ingenuity, security, rule of law, and stability, not wage suppression, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, non-tariff barriers and draconian regulations,” said Bessent. “To the extent that another country’s practices harm our own economy and people the United States will respond. This is the America First Trade Policy.”

Finally, Bessent tracked how the U.S. is updating financial tools such as sanctions and their effect on foreign policy, using actions taken against Iran as an example. According to Bessent, economic security is national security. Agreeing with past remarks by President Trump that overuse of sanctions could affect the U.S. dollar’s supremacy, Bessent added that “[l]ackadaisical sanctions simply create new markets, which must then be sanctioned and so on.” Noting that the Biden administration’s “egregiously weak” sanctions on Russian energy enabled financing of the Russian “war machine,” he stated that the Trump administration will keep the enhanced sanctions placed on Russia at the end of the last administration in place “and will not hesitate to go all in should it provide leverage in peace negotiations.” He added, “Per President Trump’s guidance, sanctions will be used explicitly and aggressively for immediate maximum impact. They will be carefully monitored to ensure that they are achieving specific objectives.”

Bessent then laid out the actions taken against Iran under President Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” campaign as an example of how the administration’s sanctions policy will work. “Making Iran Broke Again will mark the beginning of out updated sanctions policy,” stated Bessent. The Maximum Pressure campaign against Iran is designed to collapse Iranian oil exports and will target all states of Iran’s oil supply chain and will be coupled with “vigorous government engagement and private sector outreach,” Bessent remarked. “We will close off Iran’s access to the international financial system by targeting regional parties that facilitate the transfer of its revenues. Treasury is prepared to engage in frank discussions with these countries,” he said. “We are going to shut down Iran’s oil sector and drone manufacturing capabilities.”

RegulatoryActivity: BankingOperations FinancialStability PrudentialRegulation