Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is at least 6 feet, four inches tall and, at age 63, technically only a few years from retirement age. But next to Art Laffer, the octogenarian free-market economist who clocks in at five-and-a-half feet, Bessent looks like a colossus.

This, of course, is the joke that a dozen speakers in a row cannot help but make to a packed audience spilling out of the party at the Treasury building. The crowd has congregated at 1500 Pennsylvania Ave. NW to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the eponymously named Laffer curve. But as much as the party is a celebration of Laffer’s legendary discovery, it is a promise of a passing of the torch. For as much as President Donald Trump has embraced more heterodox economics in his understanding of trade deals as the art of the realpolitik, Bessent serves as the president’s more conventionally capitalist consigliere and counterweight.

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And in the 156-year-old Cash Room of the Treasury building, the masses more or less admit that the global bond market is being single-handedly stabilized by Bessent’s willingness to throw a punch at members of the administration who defy the White House‘s strategy.

I mean this literally. Whether it’s ensuring investor faith in the Treasury’s ability to collect revenue or avoiding the $4 trillion tax hike that would have happened had Congress let the bulk of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expire, Bessent is willing to be Trump’s good cop on TV and bad cop in the halls of Washington, D.C.

“We recently passed the One Big Beautiful Bill,” said Ambassador Jamieson Greer, the nation’s trade representative. “I’m told what happened was Secretary Bessent went to every single legislator and said, ‘I’m going to punch you in the face.'”

This is more or less the second non-denial of a report that Bessent has brushed into physical blows with a rogue actor within the Trump administration.

Just the day before Tuesday’s fete at the Treasury, POLITICO reported that Bessent lambasted Bill Pulte, the nepo-grandbaby director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, for badmouthing him to the president. At a swanky inaugural dinner at a new MAGA members-only club, Bessent told Pulte, “I’m gonna punch you in your f***ing face” and “f***ing beat your ass,” and demanded Pulte’s ouster from the soiree. Recall that before Elon Musk’s infamous flameout from the Department of Government Efficiency, Bessent and his fellow billionaire also allegedly brawled over the leadership of the Internal Revenue Service.

And just as press secretary Karoline Leavitt more or less conceded the validity of the report about Bessent and Musk, the White House is seemingly laughing about the tiff between Bessent and Pulte.

Why? Because, it seems, the White House understands as well as Wall Street that Bessent is Trump’s enforcer and, more importantly, the man who can actually move markets as much as he can calm them.

Threatening to punch Bill Pulte in the face is arguably a part of this strategy.

Pulte has gifted Trump multiple political weapons in the form of damning mortgage fraud allegations against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) of the #Resistance and Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. But when it comes to policy, the new FHFA boss has given the mortgage industry nothing but headaches. In a slipshod style on X, Pulte has teased that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would count crypto holdings as assets in mortgage risk assessments and use rent payments to qualify for mortgages. Most distressingly for U.S. bondholders, Pulte was the member of the administration spearheading the movement to fire Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve without cause.

Bessent has correctly balked at all of this, not because anybody believes that Powell has not been too late to respond to the deterioration of the labor market, but rather because Bessent has one existential goal for the next four years: to minimize the rate of interest charged to American taxpayers as we finance a $37 trillion national debt.

Every one of Bessent’s decisions, speeches, television hits, and yes, even strategic media leaks, is designed to maintain the value of the $29 trillion U.S. Treasurys market by keeping bond yields low. When Pulte terrifies investors into believing that the Fed will become beholden to political interests and allow inflation to rise as a result, that achieves the opposite. Similarly, Bessent could not allow the bond market to believe that Musk and DOGE could take over and gut the IRS’s ability to keep the Treasury’s coffers full.

Outside observers will joke that the stock market is more of a game of gambling than a science, but the bond market is arguably even more capricious in the causes of its volatility. Whereas individual equities can rise in response to a new product launch or a good earnings report, bond yields, which move inversely to the value of a bond, fall based on the broad trust of investors in the ability of the U.S. government to pay back its debt. This requires recouping enough taxes to stabilize our deficit without hampering economic growth, faith that the Fed will balance price stability with full employment, and trust in the U.S. dollar’s century-long status as the world’s reserve currency.

And Bessent has to do all of this without actually being able to reform the mandatory spending that Congress and Trump both adamantly refuse to touch.

So when Bessent invites House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), multiple Republican senators, Fox News star Laura Ingraham, and a dozen other top Republican politicians and policy wonks to pay homage to one of the last and most visible living legends of the Reaganomics Renaissance, that is a promise for the future as much as it is a tribute to the past.

Recall that the thesis of the Laffer curve that the optimal tax rate to maximize tax revenue is much lower than conventional Keynesians would think because of the elasticity of taxable income. In layman’s terms, this means that if a marginal income tax rate for a worker is too high for that worker to justify working as many hours as he would with a lower tax rate, the government would actually bring in less revenue charging the higher rate than it would by charging the lower rate.

The TCJA’s 21% corporate tax rate illustrated the Laffer curve in action. Despite significantly slashing the corporate tax rate, the TCJA resulted in the total corporate income tax revenue collected by the federal government doubling since 2017. As a share of our annual economic output, it’s up 20%.

Bessent is banking on markets believing that the OBBB will deliver a similar boon to the Treasury’s coffers, branding the 17% increase in capital expenditures in the first half of this year the “CapEx comeback.” Trump’s sweeping tariff regime, which brings the consumption tax on imports to their highest effective average rate in about a century, is brandished by Bessent less as an autarkic end and more as a temporary revenue generator used as leverage to secure fairer and freer trade deals with previously protectionist countries in the long run.

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In Bessent v. Pulte, Republicans in both the White House and on the Hill uniformly bet on the treasury secretary just as they had in his feud with Musk. Bessent will now navigate the coming turnover at the central bank and his battle to restore its mission to its narrow statutory mandate, an attempt to roll back what he calls the Fed’s “‘gain of function’ monetary policy.” As markets brace for the Fed to finally lower the federal funds rate and a cooling economy, investors will have to weigh whether they trust Bessent to stabilize the ship.

Maybe Bessent will run into headwinds, but if they come from within the White House? Well, I wouldn’t bet against him.