Press Briefing: Kevin Hassett Speaks to Reporters Outside the White House - October 2, 2026

Mr. Hassett, got a few moments, sir?

I, I sure do. And apologies that I have a 10:00, but, so if w- -- if we can go quickly, I can take as many as we can fit in five minutes.

[Inaudible] could start out with a lot of headlines say oil is flowing through Hormuz again.

It is. Yeah.

Does that translate to lower gas prices at the pumps right away or two weeks from now or w- -- right now if gas is at --

Yeah.

-- $4.39 a gallon, says AAA.

Yeah. The, the fact is that the, uh, the Navy has, uh, done an astonishing thing, securing the Straits. Uh, and one metric of the, how secure the Straits are, is that the Iranian proxies have been attacking, you know, the Red Sea on the other side because they've sort of almost given up on attacking the Straits.

And so we've got the same amount of oil going through as we had before, uh, these, these actions. Uh, except for Iranian oil, which isn't going through at all.

Sure.

And so we've got the Iranian economy on the ropes, and the oil has started to go through. And looking at the data, it really picked up a few weeks ago. And so it should be, like, really, uh, almost immediate that we start to see it at the gas pump.

You called the diesel ban. Uh, is this still a live discussion in the White House? I mean, Europeans seem to be resisting, uh, releasing some more from their reserves in a meaningful way. Uh, are you gonna -- is there gonna be more pressure on the Europeans to do more?

We, we've had conversations with our European friends. Uh, the president is talking to our allies about these matters, and, uh, we expected -- there's lots of room for positive news. Uh, the Europeans have a different, uh, strategic reserve than the U.S. Ours is crude, and theirs is the refined product. And they have a massive, massive, uh, amount of refined product, especially diesel.

And so we think that they have room probably to help the global economy right now.

[Crosstalk]

You called the August jobs report a blockbuster --

Excuse me?

You called the August jobs report a blockbuster. Revised down, July revised down 29,000. [Inaudible]

Right.

How would you describe this most recent [Inaudible]

Well, well, first, uh, it was revised down to 133,000. So if I were on TV when the consensus was, what, 60? Then I would say 133 is blockbuster too, right? And one of the things about jobs numbers is that they go up and down. And you have to smooth through over the last three or four months to see what's going on. And those numbers are really positive.

And the thing to remember is that private sector employment is still booming. What's happened is because we've reduced federal employment by 300,000 workers, then the numbers, uh, are a little bit lower if you don't account for that. And don't forget that the over the last two years under Joe Biden, especially right before the election, 50% of the job creation was hiring federal government workers.

So they were trying to jimmy up the economy ahead of the election by hiring government workers. And that disruption is something that we've offset. Finally, we, we care a lot about government workers. There are a lot of great ones that we work with every day. And we follow closely labor markets, especially in the D.C. area.

And federal, uh, government workers who have moved on have been finding jobs, and the labor market now is actually stronger than before we began this. I got time for one last question.

Yeah, Kevin, uh, we know that typically the Black unemployment rate rises [Inaudible] apparent in the job market. We saw the largest increase [Inaudible]

Mm-hmm. It, it's definitely a cause for concern. And it's something that we're studying very closely. Uh, it's, uh, if you look at, like, the poverty data, they went radically in the opposite direction. And so, you know, our hope -- we're gonna watch closely. We're gonna study closely what the cause of this was.

It's, uh, highly likely related to seasonal factors and, uh, the race of people who do this kind of job as opposed to that kind of job. But we'll have more to, uh, to say about this the next time we talk because it's something we're really digging into today.

[Crosstalk]

-- to the job [Inaudible] Because [Inaudible] reacting to the job [Inaudible]

Uh, I can't talk about my conversations with the president. But yes, I did talk to him about the job report. So, thank you kindly.

-- time change. President Trump says this one, but he, he says, he says people are sick and tired of having to change their clocks twice a year. He says it's bad for business, essentially. Is it bad for business? Does it hurt the economy? Have you seen that in your numbers --

Y- -- you know, there's a really big --

-- ch- -- changing the clock?

-- economic literature on the impact of daylight savings. And I would urge you to look at some of those papers because there is, uh, disagreement among some people. But some people think that it's a big positive for the economy if we do away with it. And, uh, you know, I, I haven't been in a seminar where I've decided that I 100% buy into that in the literature.

So, thank you very much.

Enjoy yourself --

Thank you, Kevin.