Hedge fund mogul Scott Bessent, the pro-tariff Wall Street veteran and former colleague of Democratic megadonor George Soros, will become perhaps the most prominent voice shaping the Trump economy, with Bessent earning Trump’s nomination to become his Treasury Secretary amid a high-profile power struggle for the post.
Scott Bessent speaks at the National Conservative Conference in July.
Trump announced Bessent as his pick Friday evening, saying “Scott will support my Policies that will drive U.S. Competitiveness, and stop unfair Trade imbalances.”
A South Carolina native and 1984 graduate of Yale University, the 62-year-old Bessent is the founder of the hedge fund Key Square Management, which had less than $600 million in assets under management as of the end of 2023.
Bessent worked for Soros from 1991 to 2000, rising to the firm’s head of European allocation by his departure, and returned to Soros from 2011 to 2015 as the fund’s chief investment officer, departing again to run Key Square with a $2 billion investment from the 94-year-old Soros (the Wall Street Journal reports Bessent hasn’t talked to his former boss Soros “in years”).
A key advisor to Trump on economic policy, Bessent donated about $3 million to Trump and other Republican causes this election cycle, calling Trump “very sophisticated on economic policy” compared to the “economic illiterate” Harris in an interview with Forbes last week.
“I think he’d be outstanding” as Treasury Secretary, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Semafor about Bessent on Thursday, adding he spoke to Trump’s transition team about installing Bessent at the top economic post.
In a column published Nov. 15 by Fox News, Bessent went to bat for tariffs, calling the controversial import taxes at the center of Trump’s economic policy proposals a “negotiating tool with our trading partners,” pushing back on “absurd” criticism of the tariffs largely viewed by economists as inflationary, pointing to the potential for higher revenue brought in by the U.S. Treasury, the department Bessent could soon head.
Bessent was part of a crowded field of potential Treasury Secretary picks for Trump, including private equity billionaire Marc Rowan, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick (Trump’s pick for commerce secretary) and Kevin Warsh, a member of the Federal Reserve’s seven-person Board of Governors from 2006 to 2011. Bessent will succeed former Fed chief Janet Yellen, who he overlapped with at the Fed, as Treasury Secretary. Banking veteran Steven Mnuchin was the top economic official during Trump’s first term.
Elon Musk, tapped by Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, wrote on X that Bessent would be a “business-as-usual choice” for treasury secretary, whereas Lutnick would “actually enact change.”
Bessent made a name for himself at Soros by reportedly playing a key role in the firm’s bets against the British pound in the early 1990s and the Japanese yen in the early 2010s.
Bessent, who lives primarily in Charleston, S.C., with his husband John Freeman and their two children, according to the Wall Street Journal, could be the first Senate-approved LGBTQ+ member in a Republican cabinet (Richard Grenell became the first openly gay acting cabinet member when Trump tapped him as the acting director of national intelligence in 2020). “In a certain geographic region at a certain economic level, being gay is not an issue,” Bessent told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015. “If you had told me in 1984, when we graduated, and people were dying of AIDS, that 30 years later I’d be legally married and we would have two children via surrogacy, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
In an editorial published Nov. 10 in the Journal, Bessent offered a roadmap of his vision for the economy during Trump’s second term: “Restarting the American growth engine, reducing inflationary pressures, and addressing the debt burden from four years of reckless spending.” Specifically, Bessent called for an overhaul of bank regulations, “preserving” the U.S. Dollar, reforming the Inflation Reduction Act and a “renaissance in American energy investment” and “free and fair” trade, a nod to the controversial tariffs backed by Trump. Bessent also has called for Trump to appoint the next Federal Reserve chairman next year, a year before the expiration of Fed chief Jerome Powell’s term. The Treasury Secretary and Fed chairman are the two most important economic policy roles in the U.S., and Trump has often jabbed at Powell, who was a Trump appointee during his first term.
Bessent said in 2015 he only stumbled into a career on Wall Street after losing an election to serve as the editor of Yale’s student newspaper. He then accepted an internship with Soros partner Jim Rogers, who offered a couch for Bessent to sleep on. Bessent said his approach to identifying investment opportunities is “to start with an abstract concept and then look at the empirical data, as a good journalist would do.”
A “nice-looking guy,” Bessent is “one of the most brilliant men on Wall Street” and is “respected by everybody,” declared Trump on the campaign trail.