Bessent made the remark in an interview <\/a>about trade and industrial policy with CNBC Wednesday morning, as the administration ups the ante on its trade war with China. The Chinese government has announced plans to tighten its restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals in response to the Trump administration\u2019s plan to increase tariffs on Chinese goods to 100%.<\/p>\n\u201cSo we\u2019re going to set price floors and forward buying to make sure that this doesn\u2019t happen again, and we\u2019re going to do it across a range of industries,\u201d Bessent said while discussing China\u2019s dominance in rare earth mineral processing and refining capacity.<\/p>\n
The interviewer, Sara Eisen, did not specifically follow up about the price floor comment, instead asking about where Bessent plans to draw the line for the government taking stakes in companies that operate in critical industries.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration now holds a direct stake in at least five companies, including chipmaker Intel and Lithium Americas.<\/p>\n
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how the price floors would be implemented \u2014 or which sectors would be affected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that the United States government plans to \u201cset price floors\u201d across a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":307606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,79,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-307605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115382948154212524","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}