Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Friday that the economy will “be humming” in the fourth quarter of 2025.

“The United States will flourish,” Lutnick said on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria Bartiromo. “We’re going to balance our budget. You’re going to see leadership that this country is missing, and this is going to be an economy that is explosive. In the fourth quarter of 2025, this economy is going to be humming.”

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Lutnick said President Donald Trump is working to balance a trade deficit and repair five big industries: automobiles, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, lumber, and metals, including steel, copper, and aluminum.

“A giant trade deficit is not effective for our economy,” he said. “We need to balance that trade deficit because, over time, that just eats you away. That is the emergency that Donald Trump is focused on.

“We can’t have these wildly large, insane, persistent trade deficits where all these other countries just eat our lunch.”

The president insisted Friday that he will not back down on the April 2 deadline to impose global tariffs, despite fears that they could result in a short-term economic disturbance.

“We’ve been ripped off for years, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “No, I’m not going to bend at all [on] aluminum, or steel, or cars. We’re not going to bend.”

Lutnick addressed fears of an upended economy related to the profits of major industries affected by the tariffs.

LUTNICK DEFENDS TARIFFS AS TENSIONS EASE WITH ONTARIO: ‘IT’S WORTH IT’

“Everybody understands there is no reason for domestic auto production to be at 60% capacity, none,” he said. “We buy so many cars from Japan, from Korea, from Germany. I know we buy cars from Canada and Mexico, but it’s time to bring that back home.”

“We’re an incredibly smart country,” he added. “We can figure out how to make it work when they go back and forth. The fair way to do it is to enhance and encourage American production.”