US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Photo: Getty Images
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the sharp fall in the US stock market this year is largely due not to President Donald Trump’s economic policies, but to the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence from DeepSeek. This was reported by the New York Post with reference to Bessent’s interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.
According to Bessent, many people mistakenly associate the fall in stock indices with the new US president’s customs policy. In fact, he believes that the market reacted to the announcement of the Chinese company DeepSeek, which presented a new generation of artificial intelligence that can work with less data and is half the price of its American counterparts.
The Minister of Finance stressed that the problems in the market are rather “a Mag 7 issue, not a MAGA issue”, referring to the shares of the so-called “Big Seven” tech giants: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla. These companies suffered the biggest losses in January, after the DeepSeek release. The biggest blow came from NVIDIA, an AI chip maker that lost almost $600 billion in market value in one day.
Although the market partially recovered by mid-February, at the end of the month the indices went down again after a survey showed that investors were worried about the new tariffs announced by Trump. In particular, there were concerns that such a policy could trigger a new round of inflation and slow economic growth. Since 19 February, the S&P 500 index has lost almost 14%, bringing the total market losses to more than $10 trillion.
Bessent also denied claims that the Trump administration intends to weaken the dollar to boost exports. He stressed that the policy of a “strong dollar” remains unchanged and advised Americans not to listen to any analyst other than the president or the treasury secretary when it comes to currency strategy.
Thus, the new White House rhetoric is aimed at reducing political tensions around market changes and shifting the focus to global technological challenges, in particular, competition from China in the field of artificial intelligence.
