10AM Hour: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from the G20 8/31/26

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**Sara Eisen** (1:07)
Good Monday morning and welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen live here at the G20 Summit in Asheville, North Carolina with David Faber and Mike Fantoli live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Quintanilla is off today. Stocks are under a little pressure this morning as oil rises after the US and Iran resumed military strikes for the first time since July.
And we've got a big show coming up here from G20 in just a few minutes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will join me for a live interview. Later, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and then Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks will join us as well. They're just two of the CEOs attending this year's meeting. Guys, I wanted to start with this sort of money shot literally from Asheville, North Carolina, which was yesterday when Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived together by plane to Asheville. Why is that important? Well, there's so much focus right now for investors on both of these men and on fiscal and monetary leadership right now, particularly in the bond market and whether they're on the same page, when it comes to these rising bond yields, especially after last week where Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh gave what was viewed by the market as a pretty hawkish speech on inflation that put upward pressure on yields and increase the odds of a rate hike. There's Jamie Dimon with the Treasury Secretary yesterday as well. He's here to promote the whole US growth story to the rest of the world. But that's going to be one of the questions for the Treasury Secretary, which is the strategy about these bond interventions, whether he thinks it's had any impact, what he makes of his former mentor, Stanley Druckenmiller coming out publicly against them in the Wall Street Journal last week. There's so much right now for these leaders, as they're convening this group of global leaders. The other thing I would just say guys is that they want to talk US growth, and it is a bit of a departure. If you'll remember, the administration boycotted the G20 meetings last year when South Africa was the leader, and it's a different vibe.
Usually on the agenda these days, you get sustainability, you get climate change, you get coordinated action around that. They want to talk about growth rates, and what that entails guys is regulation when it comes to Europe. If you look at the lower growth rates that you've seen in Europe, I think they blame regulation. They don't have AI industry like we have in the US, and imbalances. China, while still growing a little less than 5 percent last year, is slowing, and a lot of it is because they focus so much on their export economy and not as much on their consumer economy, and I know that's a big topic for the Treasury Secretary as well. So we've got a rich agenda and a lot to talk about with these leaders, but there's the backdrop. The fact that they came together, I think, definitely has people buzzing.

**Mike Fantoli** (3:55)
Yeah, sure. And Sara, the growth rate you mentioned with the US, obviously, having that advantage largely because of the CAPEX cycle, the AI-driven investment, it also brings it right up to the doorstep of Kevin Warsh and his decision on rates, because you have this interesting two-speed economy, you have AI investment that's pretty much inured to higher borrowing rates, at least for now, and that's kind of helping to drive up the cost of borrowing in the treasury market. And then, if you hike rates, is it going to have an impact more on the housing market and the consumer economy? So I do think that that's kind of in the crux of a lot of the decisions being made as the market lifts its implied probabilities of a rate hike as soon as September.

**Sara Eisen** (4:40)
Yeah. And one of the big questions, I'm not sure that necessarily we'll get to this today, but ultimately for the Fed and for Chairman Warsh and for other policymakers that I don't think there's a clear answer to is, is the AI build out inflationary in the near term but deflationary or disinflationary in the long term and therefore, should it be treated differently by the Fed? Or do we get a Warsh like we heard in Jackson Hole last week, who is just inflation is above our target, it's not convincingly coming down, and we might have some work to do. That's why the rate hike odds, we have, I think, a good chart of, came up to more than 60% odds of a rate hike in September after that meeting. That's definitely part of the mix here, the AI story and how that's having an impact on the economy. Let's bring in Megan Casella. She's also here. She's covering the G20 in Asheville, traveling with the Treasury Secretary. Megan, we've heard from him a number of times so far since we've been here.