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Washington • President-elect Donald Trump's pick for treasury secretary says he expects U.S. interest rates to stay "relatively low for the next couple of years" — but eventually they will rise.

Steven Mnuchin tells CNBC's "Squawk Box" that the country is in a period of low rates that "have come up a little bit, which I think makes sense."

He's putting people on notice that "eventually we are going to have higher interest rates and that's something that this country is going to need to deal with."

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has suggested that the central bank is on track to raise interest rates when policymakers hold their final meeting of the year next month.

Yellen has said she has no plans to step down before her four-year term ends in early 2018.

Key members of Donald Trump's economic team are promising major changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law Congress passed to prevent another financial crisis.

Critics say the law went too far to hinder banks from making loans that people and businesses need to spend and hire.

The president-elect's pick for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, says loans are "the engine of growth" for small- and medium-sized businesses, and that the fallout from Dodd-Frank has been a cutting back on lending.

Mnuchin tells CNBC's "Squawk Box" that the incoming administration wants to "strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending, and that'll be the number one priority on the regulatory side."

And Trump's choice for commerce secretary, financier Wilbur Ross, blames the law for putting banks in a position where he says "they now have more compliance people than they have lending officers."

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, former leader of Britain's anti-EU right-wing party, says he and President-elect Donald Trump wouldn't have achieved their goals without social media.

Farage says the internet means governments "simply can't lie to us any more in the way they used to."

He says "nobody has made better use on the internet" than he did, adding "Trump has done exactly the same thing."

Farage told an international broadcast news industry conference on Wednesday his right-wing UK Independence Party "would never, ever" had gotten "off the ground" and UKIP wouldn't "have been any more than a little fringe party had it not been for YouTube."