WH’s Hassett: If Iran War Were Extended, It Would Hurt Consumers, But That’s The “Last of Our Concerns”
Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said consumer pain over the Iran War is “the last of concerns right now” in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, ‘SQUAWK BOX’ CO-HOST: When you math out the possibilities within your own group about the economy and this impact here, and you say it’s going to end sometime soon, what does that look like? Do you say 10 days is one version, 30 days is another, 60 days is another, or are you on a different timeline completely? KEVIN HASSETT: Well, again, what we work off of is, first of all, what the president said, which is that it’s a four to six week program, and we’re ahead of schedule, and we’re in the third week. And so then we, you could say, call that a base case. But of course, you know, I get paid to worry, it’s my job here in the White House. And then you think about, well, what if it’s a little slower? We don’t have much simulating to do if it’s faster than that. But if it’s a little bit slower, what happens then? But the fact is that the U.S. economy is fundamentally sound, and that if it were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about, you know, if that continued, what we would have to do about that. But that’s like really the last of our concerns right now, because we’re very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule.
