Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was presented a real head-scratcher on Thursday, he admitted at a press conference.
"We've got a spike in oil prices today that I don't really understand," Bessent said during a White House address.
Bessent made this bold claim as the international price benchmark for oil rose 2.4 percent to reach $93.78 per barrel just before noon, Thursday, according to CNBC.
Oil prices reached their highest level in more than three weeks earlier this week after Iran pledged the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to threaten that he would announce the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!”
When Politico's Dasha Burns requested comment on the threat from a source inside the White House, she was told that Trump has decided to move away from military escalation and toward economic pressure.
"That means Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is more involved in the war than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at this point," Burns explained.
Yet, despite his position of power as both a war advisor and the leader of the department that balances (or tries to) the budget of the U.S. government, Bessent admitted he couldn't understand how continuing hostilities against a country that controls the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's primary waterway passages for the oil trade, would cause oil prices remain high.
This left viewers scratching their heads, too.
"Feels like it’s his job to know," replied political commentator Chris Robinson, "but I understand Bessent is just a humble soybean farmer who’s estimated worth is half a billion dollars,."
Another political commentator, Jim Stewartson argued that it was a question of intelligence.
"In addition to being an amoral greedmonster, " he wrote, "Scott Bessent is unbearably dumb."
But HFI Research, whose substack on energy policy reaches roughly 19,000 readers, argued it was a question of honesty, writing, "If you are going to lie, at least try."