University of Michigan economics and public policy professor Justin Wolfers drew chuckles from a television host and a CNBC economics reporter as he described President Donald Trump's policies — particularly on fuel prices — as a version of what he called the "Trump two-step."

Speaking on MS NOW with host Stephanie Ruhle, CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman reported that bond market participants are unhappy with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — the official who oversees U.S. government borrowing — over his recent statement that he is "The House," a reference to the casino dealer who holds the advantage.

"Most of the people who I talked to in the bond market kind of laughed at that, because he is specifically not the house, unless he has a very large cache of cash, which he doesn't really have, and the effort of taking on the $40 trillion bond market, it requires a lot of money that Bessent didn't have," said Liesman. "So he said that. And most of the people who trade these bonds and have large trillion-dollar portfolios of them didn't think much of the comment."

"And of course you could see how much they thought of the comment by what you just reported, which is what happened to bond yields," he continued, as the screen showed early morning market numbers dropping. "I don't see the market reacting very much to his comment today because, frankly, they didn't think the Treasury was going to do or could do very much about it."

The exchange came on the heels of another week of rising oil prices — costs that feed into pump prices and broader inflation — and Wolfers sees Trump's latest plan as the same old thing, dressed up differently.

"So, let's actually start by asking the question: is there any there-there. So back in March, in fact, the G7 had promised 400 million barrels," Wolfers began. "And so more or less we hadn't gotten the full 400. We got in about 320, which means across the G7 there were 80 million short. They just announced 100 million. So most of this announcement is, we are going to clean up and do what we announced previously. As far as I can tell."

The G7 — the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada — that pledge in March, and on Wolfers' arithmetic the new 100-million-barrel figure barely covers the 80-million-barrel shortfall, leaving roughly 20 million barrels of genuinely fresh supply.

"Second thing I should add, this is actually a very, very small amount. It sounds like a lot if you, you know, a hundred million barrels. I couldn't fit that in my living room. But relative to how much the world uses, it's actually very, very small amount," he explained. "So I think this has turned out to be something of a PR coup, which is I've been asked about it on every network."

For scale, the world consumes more than 100 million barrels of oil per day, so the pledge amounts to roughly a single day of global demand.

"It looks like the president's doing something here," Wolfers continued. "It's below the surface that it becomes something else. It's the old Trump administration bait-and-switch, which is announce first, act later. And what you've already announced, re-announced. And then pretend that's new economic policy and pretend you're doing something about the issue. Look, the issue is pretty straightforward. It's the Strait of Hormuz. It's closed, okay."

The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman, is one of the world's most heavily used oil transit routes — and, in Wolfers' telling, its closure is the real problem. How much of the pledged oil actually reaches buyers, and any development at the strait itself, are the concrete markers to watch next.