If you’d like to know how Donald Trump’s closing speech at the G7 went, it’s probably best to start at the part where he asked Scott Bessent whether the stock market was smarter than his Treasury secretary.
“No, sir,” Bessent dutifully replied. He was disagreeing with a notion Trump had just posited, but it was clear from his tone of voice that he didn’t mean to disagree. He was simply trying to make real-time sense of what his boss had just said, which happened to be the semi-coherent and utterly baffling: “The stock market is more brilliant than anybody there is, including people on this stage, apart from me. What do you think, Scott, is the stock market more brilliant than you?”
