Breitbart Business Digest: Stacking Those $250 Trump Bills

Weekly Wrap: Making It Rain with Trump Bills

Welcome back to Friday! This is the Breitbart Business Digest weekly wrap, our septidialogic sweep through the economic and financial news.

This week the economy failed to get indigestion from the high price of gas, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told us about getting fed at the Fed, Trump put something new in the app stores, and everyone started dreaming about putting a couple of Donalds in their wallet.

It’s All About The Donalds, Baby

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday confirmed media reports that the Treasury Department is working on plans for a $250 bill that would bear the likeness of President Donald Trump. U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach, whose office in the Treasury building looks out on the White House, has ordered prototypes to be constructed.

The initial report from the Washington Post splashed over progressive Americans like water on the Wicked Witch of the West. Imagine how glorious it would be to pay for a latte in a hipster coffee shop in Brooklyn or Cambridge or Berkeley with a Trump greenback.

We regret to inform you that this possibility is not imminent. Secretary Bessent also confirmed that it would take a change of law to allow a living president’s visage to appear on the currency. There is a bill, introduced last year by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), that would not only allow but require Secretary Scott Bessent to print $250 notes featuring Trump’s portrait. But Democrats would probably filibuster such a bill until the end of time, even if the unreliable Republican leadership on Capitol Hill permitted it to make it to the floor of the Senate.

There was a Calvin Coolidge coin minted for the 150th anniversary. There are already plans for a memorial coin with Trump’s likeness for the nation’s 250th birthday. If the Treasury did print the $250 bill, carrying one around would likely become fashionable among MAGA Americans. And since the Democrats would likely seek to kill the bill as soon as possible, they would likely become limited edition collector’s items. A few years from now, you might be able to trade your Trump $250 bill for three, four, or five Benjamins.

Bessent Breakfasts with Warsh

Speaking of Bessent, which we just realized we’re going to do a lot of in this week’s wrap, he had breakfast on Friday with the newly minted Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh. “As President Reagan would say, it’s a new day at the Fed,” Bessent told Larry Kudlow at an event at the Reagan Presidential Library.

Bessent explained that the Treasury Secretary and the Fed chair have lunch or breakfast every week, and that the location of this shared meal rotates between the Fed’s headquarters and the Treasury’s building. An “away game” and a “home game,” Bessent called these meetings.

“I did the away game at the Fed. The food is much better at the Fed,” Bessent admitted. “And that’s because they don’t have a budget. They print their own money.”

Bessent also mentioned that he likes Warsh’s plan to get rid of forward guidance from the Fed. We assume this will not apply to the weekly menu.

There’s an App for That

So you can now go onto the app store of your preference and download the official Trump Accounts app, a key next step in the launch of the administration’s new investing accounts for children.

The accounts themselves do not debut until July 4, but you can sign up for them now. They’re tax-deferred savings vehicles, something like a traditional IRA for youngsters. If you had a kid last year or have one during the remaining years of the Trump administration, the government will seed it with $1,000. Parents can contribute up to $5000 per year for each child’s accounts, and some big employers have already announced they’ll match these contributions. There are also new charities springing up to make contributions, particularly for children of lower-income families.

In his talk with Kudlow, Bessent said that one of the big benefits of the Trump accounts would be to encourage financial literacy. Kids with money in the stock market—most of the accounts will be invested in broad, low-cost S&P 500 style funds—have a big incentive to understand the importance to our economy of profits, asset appreciation, and business innovation.

Sadly, Kudlow did not ask if the app could be updated to let children know how many Trump bills their account could currently buy.

America Awakes

It wasn’t all free food and apps at the Reagan library on Friday. Secretary Bessent’s keynote speech, titled “While America Slept,” combined intellectual weight and human warmth beyond anything we’ve heard in living memory from a U.S. economic official.

It’s worth reading the entire speech, but we know you are busy, so we read it for you.

Spoiler alert! Here’s how it ends.

America has awakened.

We are alert to the fact that a resilient economy is the foundation of a strong republic.

That we can measure the health of our economy not merely by what it produces, but by whom it lifts.

That secure supply chains matter as much as stock indices. That productive capacity is power.

That trade policy, industrial policy, and national security policy must all fit together, or they will each fail separately.

That last line is an allusion to a warning typically attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “We must all hang together,” the man whose face adorns our $100 bills said, “Or surely we will all hang separately.”

The Economy Ain’t Running on Fumes

The economy is holding up against $100 a barrel oil and high gasoline prices.

The Chicago Fed National Activity index turned positive this week, as did the Dallas Fed’s manufacturing index. The Richmond Fed’s manufacturing index crushed expectations for a reading of four, coming in at 13. The Atlanta Fed’s survey of businesses showed sales growth expectations of better than five percent. Durable goods orders were much stronger than expected. Corporate profits—the mother’s milk of stocks and the lifeblood of the economy, as Kudlow likes to say—are booming, helping the stock market hit new highs every few days. Jobless claims continue to drag along near historic lows. The trade deficit fell in April, and business inventories kept climbing. The Chicago PMI saw one of the biggest one-month jumps in history, with new orders rising to the highest level since the post-pandemic rebound of 2022.

Inflation is still too high, and the higher gas prices are making it worse, as this week’s release of the April personal consumption expenditures price index showed. But the monthly rise for April was less than expected and much slower than in March. What’s more, consumer spending did not crack under the pressure of fuel pump prices. There were even significant increases in spending on recreational goods and restaurants. People are still enjoying themselves—even if the official surveys say consumer sentiment is clinically depressed.

Istanbul Was Once Constantinople

Five hundred and seventy-three years ago, the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II breached the Theodosian Walls surrounding Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire.

One of the consequences of the fall of Constantinople was the throttling of the Silk Road trade routes. The Ottomans didn’t close them outright. They imposed tolls and extracted rents at every chokepoint, which might sound familiar to some of you. These tolls drove up the cost of importing Eastern goods for European merchants and caused shortages. This pushed Europe to turn away from the roads leading east and toward the seas to the west.

The result was Columbus, da Gama, and the entire Age of Exploration. And, eventually, the founding of our ornery Republic on the continent across the western sea.