Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defends Trump’s handling of the economy following a string of lackluster employment reports. He says on NBC’s Meet The Press that the August jobs report might be unreliable and should be taken with grains of salt: • “August is the noisiest month” • “we’re not going to do economic policy off of one number” • “If things are so bad, why was the GDP at 3.3%? Why is the stock market at a new high?” But in the same interview, he also implies the jobs numbers might be telling a different story: that the economy was not quite as strong as the White House has claimed it was and needs lower interest rates to shore up weaker growth • “If in fact these numbers are true, it shows that President Trump was right about the Federal Reserve. They are too late. And because of the bad numbers, they likely would have been cutting in June.”(Nick Timiraos)