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Transcript: IBM vice chairman Gary Cohn on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Sept. 20, 2026

2026-09-20T12:51:00-0400 / CBS News

The following is the transcript of the interview with IBM vice chair Gary Cohn, who served as an economic adviser in President Trump’s first term, that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sept. 20, 2026.

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MARGARET BRENNAN: And we’re joined now by Gary Cohn. He is the vice chairman at IBM. He previously served as a top economic advisor to President Trump during that first term. Welcome back. It’s always good to have you here.

GARY COHN: Thanks for having me.

MARGARET BRENNAN: So we have a lot of pressure points right now. One of them is diesel prices at this record high, motor oil jet fuel costs. They’re all affecting consumers. And this is not just in America. I mean around the world. The video alone of what’s happening with protests in some of these countries in Syria, Philippines, Guatemala, all gas price protests. How concerned are you about the state of the consumer and the global economy?

GARY COHN: Well, Margaret, I think you went through the exact topic that the consumer in the United States is most concerned about, it’s energy and energy products. You know, you start with gasoline. The most obvious thing, people go to the pump daily, weekly. And they sit there and they hold the nozzle down and they watch the numbers tick, and they see these numbers are higher than they were last week, and they’re higher than the week before. Is this ever going to stop? So directly they see it then indirectly when you talk about diesel, diesel is really the feedstock for food in this country. You know our farmers go through diesel to, to grow their crops, to pick their crops, to deliver their crops. The transportation network is all dependent on diesel. So they see the second hand effects of diesel in the economy as well. So the consumer sentiment has turned quite negative. And then throw on top of that the- the unknowns of AI is really concerning people because they see very high prices. They’re unsure about AI, they’re unsure about the job market. And so sentiment has become quite negative recently. It’s become negative. And yet, you hear Treasury Secretary Bessent and others saying we’ve got all these positive data points, right, with like, you know, the poverty rate in this country, really at a historic low. This morning, he was posting about that on social media as he’s getting ready to meet with the Chinese. He says there’s strong foreign demand for U.S. assets. He refutes the idea that investors are balking at treasuries. But there does seem this concern about America’s stability in fiscal health.

GARY COHN: You know, we’re- we’re in a very funny place here. The overall economy is quite stable. So if you look at some of the headline indicators, you look at GDP, you look at employment, you look at consumer spending. The numbers are pretty good. They’re pretty good to very good. So what’s actually going on in the day to day economy that Secretary Bessent’s talking about. He’s right. But when you ask consumers about how they feel about the economy and where they think they’re going to be in a month from now, a quarter from now, a year from now, then you see this very negative sentiment of all of these issues flowing through. But we have not seen a slowdown in consumption. That said, we have seen real wages turn negative in the last few months, meaning that wage growth is slower than inflation growth. So your purchasing power goes down. But people have decided to use their savings and savings is diminishing. They’ve decided to use their savings to continue to consume products the way they have always consumed products. Now that can’t go on forever. We will run out of savings.

MARGARET BRENNAN: It says a lot about us as Americans, isn’t it?

GARY COHN: Well, we are very good consumers in America.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, this past week we had this significant move, though, by the new Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh. I know you know him personally. He came out and said the economy is strengthening with new hiring, private sector earnings, capital investment. But the Open Market Committee unanimously said we’ve got to hike rates because of persistent inflation. Did it surprise you?

GARY COHN: Not at all. As you know, the Fed has a dual mandate. Mandate number one is full employment. And in the chair came out and talked about how strong the employment was. I just talked about how the strong employment picture in the United States is. Point 2 that they deal with, the second part of their mandate is something called stable prices. Stable prices means that they’re trying to shoot for a 2% unemployment rate. The chairman has made it very clear, very clear that he is going to fight inflation. He said it in his first meeting. He said it in his Jackson Hole. He said in any interview he’s given, he’s told you he’s going to fight inflation. So we now come to this meeting last week and we still have inflation up in the high 2%, two point closer to 3%. And he did exactly what he told you he was going to do. And more importantly, he did it with the unanimous vote of all of the governors in the Fed. I think it’s been many, many meetings. I don’t want to guess exactly, but it’s probably been six, six plus meetings since we have had a consensus unanimous vote inside the Fed.

MARGARET BRENNAN: And on the cusp of an election that’s surprised so many people. But the president said the Fed did the wrong thing—maybe he meant politically—but practically speaking, what will this hike do?

GARY COHN: So practically, it’s an interesting hike because we all know that the inflation is being driven from the supply side of the equation, meaning that we don’t have enough supply in the system going back to energy, if we had more energy in the system, the price of energy would come down and we’d see some of the deflation come out of the system. So this is not—this cut can’t change the amount of oil that’s in the system, it can’t create diesel, it can’t create gasoline. But what– what this increase does—sorry about that—this increase does is it makes the cost of borrowing more expensive and that’s the intention. The intention is to have consumers buy less product, therefore there’s less demand that offsets with the lower supply that we have in the- in the system. It’s really a balancing act in here. Now it’s 25 basis points. And remember, it’s federal funds, which means it’s the very front end of the interest rate curve. So they raise the rates in the front end of the interesting curve. An interesting thing actually happened—the longer dated securities interest sensitive actually got cheaper or the rates went down on them.

MARGARET BRENNAN: The government bonds.

GARY COHN: So the key- the government bonds. So in essence the curve which had been fairly steep, meaning the difference between the overnight rate and the 30 year rate, it technically flattened. So the differential between those two rates flattened. So to the extent that people are getting a mortgage, or they’re getting a car loan, or they’re financing their credit card, the rate of which the banks used to set that really did not change or went lower over the course of the week. And the rate at which depositors can get money overnight on their deposits actually went up.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, you- thank you on the yield curve and bonds because that’s where I was going on Bessent. The Treasury Secretary buying $5 billion in US debt. Does that improve anything or is it really just Congress has got to cut their own spending?

GARY COHN: Well, ultimately Congress has to cut their own spending. And it’s not only just Congress. We have enormous demand from the data centers and the AI world. There’s more debt being issued by corporates as well as the governments than we’ve seen in a long period of time. But what Secretary Bessent was doing is exactly what Chairman Warsh is doing. They’re both trying to make the longer end of the curve, the part of the curve where you and I borrow money. When we get a car, we buy a home. They’re trying to make the longer dated maturities cheaper. They’re trying to drive the interest rates down on the long end of the curve. Secretary Bessent used the tool he has available to him, and Chairman Warsh used the tool he has available to them, and they’re both driving the same outcome.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we’ll see if it works.

GARY COHN: We will—we will hope it works.

MARGARET BRENNAN: We’ll hope it works. Gary Cohn, always good to have you here.

GARY COHN Thanks for having me.

MARGARET BRENNAN: We’ll be back in a moment.