Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday the U.S. is “suffocating” Iran’s regime using escalating financial pressure, frozen assets and a naval blockade, while predicting that oil prices could fall as more non-Iranian supply reaches the market.
Bessent said President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury to implement “economic fury” upon Iran. The U.S. is closely monitoring Iranian financial networks, offshore assets and any attempts to move money into the country to aid the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), he said.
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“The way to think about that [economic fury] — we were running a marathon over the past 12 months, and now we are sprinting towards the finish line… We are suffocating the regime, and they are not able to pay their soldiers,” he said on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Bessent said the U.S. had “all hands on deck,” blockading Iran in a very literal sense with the Navy and economically by cracking down on the IRGC, which he called a “corrupt institution.”
“They’ve been stealing from the Iranian people for years. They have money offshore. We’ve tracked that down. We will continue to track that down, and we’re going to preserve those assets for the Iranian people on the other side of this conflict.”
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Iran’s oil infrastructure is deteriorating, he added. Storage is rapidly filling, and the regime may have to begin shutting in wells “in the next week.”
He predicted this would lead to lower oil prices, pointing to the futures market, which shows that “oil prices are already lower three months, six months, nine months out,” and claiming that there are “hundreds of oil tankers waiting in the Gulf to come out.”
Some Gulf states also assisted the U.S. in tracking down Iranian financial assets after the regime bombed their neighbors, a move Bessent described as a significant miscalculation.