More than 50 countries have reached out to the White House to begin trade talks, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday as U.S. officials sought to defend sweeping new tariffs that have unleashed global turmoil.

During an interview on ABC News' 'This Week,' U.S. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett denied that the tariffs were part of a strategy by Trump to crash financial markets to pressure the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

He said there were would be no "political coercion" of the central bank. In a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump shared a video that suggested his tariffs aimed to hammer the stock market on purpose in a bid to force lower interest rates.

In a separate interview on NBC News's Meet the Press, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the stock market drop and said there was "no reason" to anticipate a recession based on the tariffs.

Trump jolted economies around the world after he announced broad tariffs on U.S. imports on Wednesday, triggering retaliatory levies from China and sparking fears of a globe trade war and recession.

On Sunday morning talk shows, top Trump officials sought to portray the tariffs as a savvy repositioning of the U.S. in the global trade order and the economic disruptions as a short-term fallout.

U.S. stocks have tumbled by around 10% in the two days since Trump announced a new global tariff regime that was more aggressive than analysts and investors had been anticipating.

It is a drop that market analysts and large investors have blamed on Trump's aggressive push on tariffs, which most economists and the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve believe risk stoking inflation and damaging economic growth.

Tariff-stunned markets face another week of potential tariff turmoil, with fallout from Trump's sweeping import levies keeping investors on edge after the worst week for U.S. stocks since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis five years ago.

Hassett told ABC News' 'This Week' that Trump's tariffs had so far driven "more than 50" countries to contact the White House to begin trade talks.

Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te on Sunday offered zero tariffs as the basis for talks with the U.S., pledging to remove trade barriers rather than imposing reciprocal measures and saying Taiwanese companies will raise their U.S. investments.

Unlike other economists, Hassett said he did not expect a big hit to consumers because exporters were likely to lower prices.

Bessent told NBC News he did not anticipate a recession based on the tariffs, citing stronger-than-anticipated U.S. jobs growth.

"We could see from the jobs number on Friday, that was well above expectations, that we are moving forward, so I see no reason that we have to price in a recession," Bessent said.

In Saudi Arabia, where the markets were open Sunday, the bourse was down 6.78 percent -- the worst daily loss since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to state media.

Larry Summers, formerly Director of the National Economic Council under president Barack Obama, said "there is a very good chance there's going to be more turbulence in markets the way we saw on Thursday and Friday."

A drop like that following the announcement of tariffs "signals that there's likely to be trouble ahead, and people ought to be very cautious," he wrote on X.

Peter Navarro, Trump's tariff guru, has pushed back against the mounting nervousness and insisted to investors that "you can't lose money unless you sell."

"Right now, the smart strategy is not to panic, just stay in, because we are going to have the biggest boom in the stock market we've ever seen under the Trump policies," Navarro, who has become the public face of tariffs, told Fox News.

Russia has not been targeted by the latest raft of tariffs, and Hassett cited talks with Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine as the reason for their omission from the hit list.

"There's obviously an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, and I think the President made the decision not to conflate the two issues. It doesn't mean that Russia, in the fullest of time, is going to be treated wildly different than every other country," Hassett said.

On Wednesday a White House official suggested the reason for Russia's omission was because trade was negligible thanks to sanctions.

Trump has long insisted that countries around the world that sell products to the United States are in fact ripping Americans off, and he sees tariffs as a means to right that wrong.

But many economists have warned that tariffs are passed on to consumers and that they could see price rises at home.

Material from Agence France-Presse was used in this story.