From the sofa in his office overlooking the White House, Scott Bessent, Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, summed up how he approaches the job.
“We want the most America-first policies that are possible, without incurring market wrath,” said the 63-year-old hedge fund manager from South Carolina who now runs the cabinet agency responsible for the world’s largest economy and most important debt market.
In just nine months, Bessent has staunchly promoted Trump’s aggressive tariff policies, championed the president’s effort to overhaul the Federal Reserve — including his attempt to fire governor Lisa Cook — and ushered in a new era of sweeping deregulation and tax cuts, including the loosening of crypto rules and the promotion of stablecoins.
But he has also brought Maga to the US Treasury in other ways: vowing to use the Internal Revenue Service to probe left-leaning organisations the government suspects of fuelling political violence. The targets could include groups affiliated with George Soros, the veteran liberal billionaire for whom Bessent worked for years.
Internationally, Bessent is also orchestrating a multibillion-dollar US rescue package for Argentina to prop up President Javier Milei, Trump’s libertarian ally in Latin America. It has placed him on the US government’s side of a currency trade — the kind of bet he and Soros, famous for breaking the British pound, once relished as investors.
Bessent spoke to the Financial Times twice this month, including just hours before announcing US sanctions on Russian oil exporters and ahead of a high-stakes trip to Asia, where he will flank Trump as he tries to resolve trade tensions with China that have flared up again in recent weeks.
Does he see his role as different from that of other Treasury secretaries, including Steven Mnuchin, who held the post in Trump’s first term?
“Unlike most of my predecessors I have a very healthy scepticism of elite institutions and elite opinion, whereas I think they didn’t,” Bessent said. “But I have a healthy regard for the market,” he added.
He also distanced himself from other populist governments around the world with unorthodox policies. “What gets the people in trouble is they come in, they have these ideas, but they don’t respect the market . . . you’ve got to respect the market.”
Bessent’s willingness to unabashedly deploy Trump’s Maga agenda at the heart of the Treasury, which was seen as a hub of institutional resistance to the president’s policies during his first term, has endeared him to Trump and increased his influence, say multiple administration officials and other people close to the White House.
“I was just with Trump and he was talking about Bessent, and I think he’s got a huge amount of faith in him,” said David McCormick, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, who served as the senior Treasury official for international affairs under George W Bush.
“He’s viewed as a voice of reason. He’s viewed as someone who gets it done. He’s viewed as someone who has the president’s trust,” he added.
But the stakes resting on this relationship are high.
Some critics and former Treasury officials say Bessent has not just shaken the department’s free-market orthodoxies on trade, government intervention, and central bank autonomy, he has also made it more partisan.
Bessent has kept the markets relatively in check after Trump launched his global trade war in April © Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“If Treasury is viewed as an overly politicised institution . . . it loses face or credibility with markets and with market participants in a way that has, I think, serious and substantive ramifications,” one former Treasury official said.
“That credibility is worth its weight in gold. And what I see from Bessent . . . is that he’s really frittering away that stockpile, so to speak, at a rapid clip.”
Bessent has kept the markets relatively in check in recent months, stabilising investor confidence in the US after Trump launched a global trade war in April, triggering a blistering sell-off in equities and bonds.
Since he was sworn into the job on January 28, the S&P 500 equity index has risen about 12 per cent, while the 10-year Treasury yield, a proxy for long-term borrowing costs, has dropped by slightly more than half a percentage point over the same period to 4 per cent.
Bessent sees these figures as vindication over critics who warned that Trump’s policies would trigger a burst of new inflation and inflate US debt, forcing investors to flee.
“He is straddling this line between appeasing Trump and appeasing the markets. And so far, he’s made it work. Neither have turned on him,” said Ian Katz, an analyst at Capital Alpha in Washington.
Bessent puts it more bullishly: “Where the hell is the market risk? They’ve just been wrong.”
In the chaotic days after Trump’s so-called liberation day tariffs in April, it was Bessent who won credit as a voice of calm in the market storm. Trump quickly paused some of the highest tariffs and started negotiating deals — as Bessent hit the phones to soothe anxious fund managers.
He said that the turmoil was part of Trump’s master plan, telling the FT that the president had always planned to announce high levies to create leverage, and then bring them down.
“He has a higher risk tolerance than I do,” Bessent said.
On Wall Street, Bessent is considered a buffer against some of Trump’s excesses — including persuading the president not to fire Jay Powell, the Fed chair, ahead of his term ending. Clashes while in office have reinforced the Treasury secretary’s image of willing to stand his ground. One apparently turned physical between him and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s election. Another almost became physical with Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
“When it counts, he’s a fighter in our corner,” said one Wall Street lobbyist. “It’s almost like this ‘Bessent put’ — he knows not to go too far where the markets would be disrupted . . . CEOs are pretty fearful of the administration but Bessent is our id.”
But is this confidence overdone?
“Mnuchin was still trying to be a guardrail of sorts, but if markets are looking for Bessent to be a guardrail I think they are looking for too much,” said Stephen Myrow, managing partner at Beacon Policy Advisors and a former Treasury official under George W Bush. “Bessent has no problem being political, which eventually could run a risk with the market.”
Some of these doubts may be visible in the dollar, which has dropped by about 8 per cent since Bessent became Treasury secretary.
Bessent argues that it will rebound as trade deficits start narrowing. Democrats say the market is losing confidence in the US economy and American assets.
“I was in New York two weeks ago meeting with a bunch of bankers, and one of them said to me that for the first time in his career, he’s hearing people talking about hedging the dollar,” said Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat on the House financial services committee.
“This is insane.”
Over recent months, Bessent’s overt role in amplifying and justifying Trump’s criticism of the Fed has set him apart from previous Treasury secretaries. Bessent offered full throated support as Trump tried to fire Cook, a central bank governor nominated by Joe Biden.
Fed governor Lisa Cook has denied allegations of mortgage fraud © Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg
“There are people who think that president Trump is putting undue pressure on the Fed, and there are people like president Trump and myself who think that if a Fed official committed mortgage fraud that this should be examined, and that they shouldn’t be serving as one of the nation’s leading financial regulators,” Bessent told Fox Business in late August.
Cook, the Fed’s first Black female governor, has denied the fraud allegations and remains in her post pending a Supreme Court ruling on Trump’s order to sack her.
More out of the ordinary was Bessent’s 6,000 word essay in The International Economy magazine, which criticised the Fed for exceeding its mandate by using non-standard monetary policies such as quantitative easing to keep money cheap after the financial crisis, and backing regulation in areas such as climate.
“[The Fed] are undermining themselves,” Bessent said in his office.
The Treasury secretary is now leading the search for Trump’s next Fed chair — and has challenged the candidates on aspects of his article, the FT reported this month. He expects to do another round of interviews with top candidates in November before presenting his top picks to the president by Christmas.
But Bessent does not think there is anything unusual in Trump’s attempts to reshape the Fed.
He pulled out a copy of Maestro, Bob Woodward’s book on former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, and pointed to a passage describing how Bill Clinton’s White House tried to push choice candidates on to the central bank board in 1994 to thwart Greenspan’s interest rate increases.
“It’s always political,” he said.
The boss seems to be pleased.
A White House spokesperson described Bessent as an “invaluable asset”, due to his “immensely successful private sector experience, relationships in the financial industry and commitment to America First policies”.
Trump “has confidence in secretary Bessent because he has continually delivered on the president’s agenda”, the official said.
It has helped Bessent that he emerged into the president’s entourage in recent years with the blessing of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist turned podcast host, connecting him directly to the Maga base.
“He has been very careful about guarding his right flank,” the former Treasury official said.
When Michael Faulkender, deputy Treasury secretary, fell out of favour with the White House and the Maga faithful earlier this year amid turmoil and turnover at the IRS, Bessent initially defended him but ultimately did not object to his abrupt sacking. Faulkender declined to comment on Bessent or the reasons for his exit.
Bessent also accepted Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August — just after it issued a gloomy jobs report — even as the move sparked concerns that the administration was undermining crucial independent data.
Under Bessent, the IRS is sharing individuals’ tax data with the department of homeland security as part of Trump’s illegal immigration crackdown. The secretary is also mobilising the agency to help the president’s attacks on perceived political foes.
In mid-October, as trade tensions flared again with China and officials gathered in Washington for the annual IMF and World Bank meetings, Bessent made an appearance on the Charlie Kirk podcast, broadcast from the Cash Room of the US Treasury.
Bessent said Kirk’s killing in September was like a “domestic 9/11” and the Treasury would “follow the money” to pursue leftwing groups the administration has accused of fuelling political violence.
“We have started to compile lists, put together networks, and there’s a long record here. And we don’t know how much of the support is coming in from overseas. We don’t know how much is being supported by US non-profits,” Bessent said. “But this is mission critical for us now.”
But so is keeping the Maga base onside, just as a backlash builds.
Bessent and Argentine President Javier Milei at the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Awards in New York on September 24. The Treasury secretary’s attempt to pull together a rescue package for the South American country has drawn the ire of Trump allies © Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
Bessent’s effort to pull together a rescue package for Argentina has drawn the ire of Trump allies from farming groups to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman.
“Tell me how it’s America First to bailout a foreign country with $20 or even $40 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” she wrote on X recently.
Even more significant for Bessent will be whether he can deliver the “golden age” promised by Trump.
Bessent expects Trump’s agenda and what he described as emerging productivity gains from artificial intelligence to drive an economic upswing next year.
But so far in 2025, employment growth has slowed and inflation remains stubbornly above the Fed’s target of 2 per cent. Polling gives Trump dismal ratings on his handling of the economy.
But Bessent is convinced that the unorthodox policies he is bringing to Treasury for Trump will prevail.
“My job is to give the president options and outcomes and the president decides how far to push things,” he said.