Trump picks Scott Bessent to lead Treasury: will he succeed?

Scott Bessent of Key Square Group LP, during an interview in Washington

(Image credit: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

published 9 December 2024

Three decades before he was tapped to lead the US Treasury department, Scott Bessent was asked to “break” another country’s financial system, says The New York Times. Then 29, he played a key role in financier George Soros’s big bet against the Bank of England (BoE) in 1992, which “crushed” the pound – earning Soros’s fund $1 billion – and forced the UK government to pull sterling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Unsurprisingly, given “the extreme ideological differences” between the veteran financier and the president-elect, Donald Trump made no mention of his new pick’s Soros connection. Yet it was that notorious trade – and an equally audacious raid on the Japanese yen in 2013 – that has defined Bessent’s career, providing what some see as his “crucial credential” for the Treasury role.

Bessent – who in recent years has been running his own macro fund, Key Square – “could see the vulnerabilities in a way that most other people in the financial markets didn’t see”, observed a former colleague. Another credits him with being “so good at figuring out the ‘butterfly effect’”. Certainly, his pedigree as a global investor has eased the worries of business leaders and markets, says CNN. In a crowded field, he stood out as the “reasonable and pragmatic” candidate: a safe pair of hands. While signalling support for Trump’s policies and projecting “the obsequious loyalty Trump enjoys”, Bessent appears “to care deeply about containing government debt”, says The Economist, and he has a reassuringly breezy take on tariffs – viewing them as a “maximalist” negotiating tool that can be pared back during talks with trading partners. “It’s escalate to de-escalate,” he told the Financial Times.

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Bessent, 62, grew up in small-town South Carolina and graduated from Yale in 1984. He “stumbled into a career on Wall Street”, says Forbes, after a meeting with Soros’s first partner, James Rogers. The Quantum Fund sent Bessent to London, where he immersed himself in the UK economy, focusing in particular on a housing market then dominated by unfixed mortgages, says The New York Times. His intelligence proved crucial to Soros when weighing up how far he could push the BoE before it would raise rates to defend the pound. Bessent’s stint in London formed the basis of another “close friendship” that would stand him in good stead, says the Daily Mail. A big supporter of the Prince’s Trust, he became close to the current king and queen, especially after Princess Diana’s death in 1997, and “was part of the plan to improve Camilla’s image”.

Bessent’s links with the Old World still run deep, says The South China Morning Post. He is married to former New York City prosecutor John Freeman, and the couple’s two children are currently studying in Europe. Indeed, one reason why they put their Charleston mansion on the market, for a reported $22.25 million, was to spend more time there. Still, “Washington is calling”. His success there will depend on how much independence he will have, says the FT. Some have also expressed doubts about how a bookish, cerebral type with no government experience will fare managing a department employing 100,000.

Bessent, who has called Trump an “orange swan”, with reference to so-called black-swan events that unexpectedly move markets, hasn’t spoken with Soros for years, says The Wall Street Journal. Paradoxically, his past association with the financier is “a positive for Trump”, who is impressed by the billions Soros has made. But for Trump’s more extreme supporters – who have made Soros the focus of lurid conspiracy theories – Bessent’s past may prove troubling. One step wrong and he risks being tarred with the Trumpist sin of colluding with the enemy. He must tread carefully.

Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.