Elon Musk criticized him as the “business-as-usual choice” for Treasury, but markets are cheering on routine. President-elect Donald Trump announced Scott Bessent is his pick for Treasury secretary, ending an internal battle over the top economic post that some described as a knife fight.
But there’s a bullet point in Bessent’s resume that has rubbed some on the Right the wrong way. He’s the former chief investment officer for liberal billionaire George Soros, once a partner at Soros Fund Management and a major Democratic donor.
In 2000, Bessent co-hosted a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at his East Hampton, New York, home, featuring Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore.
He’s since switched his donations to the Right. In 2015, Bessent founded the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. In 2016, he donated to the Trump campaign.
Trump has described him as “one of the most brilliant men on Wall Street.”
The flattery is mutual.
“I’ve been in the investment business 35 years and Donald Trump is the most sophisticated leader on economics that I’ve met,” Bessent said on Fox Business before being tapped as Treasury secretary.
Bessent hasn’t been a mainstay of Trump’s inner circle like a lot of his other cabinet picks. Instead, the hedge fund manager reportedly won over the president-elect with his 3-3-3 plan:
- Cut the budget deficit to 3% of GDP by the final year of Trump’s term. It’s about 6% today.
- Boost GDP growth to 3%. Real GDP growth was 3% in the second quarter of 2024 and a third-quarter advance estimate has it at 2.8%.
- Get Big Oil to boost production by another 3 million barrels of crude per day.
Bessent gets the Treasury nod as a deficit hawk just as the national debt crossed the $36 trillion mark. But he isn’t just making his mark in budgets. Earlier this year, he was behind the controversial proposal to have Trump nominate a shadow Federal Reserve chair to undermine current chair Jerome Powell.
“Trump could just nominate and confirm the next Fed chair, after Jay Powell, and just have this Fed chair go around and give all sorts of speeches and influence the markets,” the Fed Guy Joseph Wang explained to Straight Arrow News. “In that way, that’s very creative. I don’t know that it will happen.”
Bessent has since backed off that plan and Powell has made clear he will firmly remain in his chair until 2026.
A Treasury secretary runner-up, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, has also been floated as the man to replace Powell as Fed chair when his term expires.
As for Bessent, investors seemed to like the moderate pick on Monday, Nov. 25, the first trading day since the announcement.
Stocks and bonds were up as analysts said investors preferred a more predictable choice. As for the guy he was supposedly in a “knife fight” with, last week Trump tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick for Commerce secretary instead.
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