US Politics

Investor Scott Bessent has been nominated by Donald Trump to serve as treasury secretary. The billionaire hedge fund manager has spent his career in finance and the nomination for this post has been one of the most anticipated in recent days.Here are five things to know about the person who could have vast influence over economic, regulatory and international affairs.His finance careerBessent, 62, from South Carolina, has spent his career in finance, working for macro investment billionaire George Soros and noted short-seller Jim Chanos, as well as running his own hedge fund.As a money manager, he made a large bet on Trump winning after spotting what he called an anomaly in the market – that political and market analysts were too negative on what a Trump victory would mean.The market’s surge after Trump’s election victory, he wrote, signaled investor expectations of “higher growth, lower volatility and inflation, and a revitalized economy for all Americans”.He’s ‘all in’ for TrumpBessent, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has advocated for tax reform and deregulation, particularly to spur more bank lending and energy production, as noted in a recent opinion piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.He has called for rolling back government subsidies, deregulating the economy and raising domestic energy production. Unlike many on Wall Street, Bessent has also defended the use of tariffs, which are Trump’s favorite economic tool.“I was all in for President Trump. I was one of the few Wall Street people backing him,” Bessent told Stone over the weekend.“Bessent has been on the side of less aggressive tariffs,” said Oxford Economics’ Ryan Sweet, adding that picking him makes the steep tariffs Trump proposed on the campaign trail less likely.He’s one of a fewBessent will take his investing knowledge down a rarefied career path that only a few other prominent Wall Street luminaries have followed: running the US Treasury.Bessent follows other financial luminaries who have taken the job, including former Goldman Sachs executives Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first treasury chief. Janet Yellen, the current secretary and first woman in the job, previously chaired the Federal Reserve and White House Council of Economic Advisers.Other examples of US treasury secretaries who have come from finance include Steven Mnuchin, who served under Trump in his first term, and had worked at Goldman Sachs. Henry Paulson, who served as Treasury secretary under George W Bush, was also a Goldman Sachs alumnus, where he had been chairman and CEO.A twisty race to the topBessent, along with John Paulson, had been an early favorite for the job earlier in the year according to a Reuters report at the time. He seemed to be in pole position a week after election day, on 12 November, when Paulson exited the race citing “complex financial obligations”.However, there were many twists in the race for the top position.On 13 November, banker Howard Lutnick, who was leading a transition team to vet personnel and draft policy, emerged as a top contender. Lutnick was reported to have directly lobbied for the Treasury post, even receiving the backing of Trump ally Elon Musk. However, Trump instead picked Lutnick, one of his biggest fundraisers, to lead his trade and tariff strategy as head of the commerce department.The pool of candidates then widened when Rowan, and former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh were under consideration as well as Republican US senator Bill Hagerty, sources with knowledge of the transition process said at the time.The choice came after days of deliberations by Trump as he sorted through a shifting list of candidates. Bessent spent day after day at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida providing economic advice, sources said, a proximity to the president-elect that may have helped him prevail.In charge of the world’s largest economyAs treasury secretary, Bessent will essentially be the highest-ranking US economic official, responsible for maintaining the balance of the world’s largest economy, from collecting taxes and paying the nation’s bills to managing the $28.6tn treasury debt market and overseeing financial regulation, including handling and preventing market crises.The treasury boss also runs US financial sanctions policy, has influence over the IMF, the World Bank and other international financial institutions, and manages national security screenings of foreign investments in the United States.Bessent will face challenges, including safely managing federal deficits that are forecast to grow by nearly $8tn over a decade due to Trump’s plans to extend expiring tax cuts next year and add generous new breaks, including ending taxes on social security income.Without offsetting revenues, this new debt would add to an unsustainable fiscal trajectory already forecast to balloon US debt by $22tn through 2033.Managing debt increases this large without market indigestion will be a challenge, though Bessent has argued Trump’s agenda will unleash stronger economic growth that will grow revenue and shore up market confidence. 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Donald Trump nominated Scott Bessent, a longtime hedge-fund investor who taught at Yale University for several years, to be his treasury secretary, a statement from Trump confirmed on Friday. The job is one of the most powerful in Washington, with huge influence over America’s gigantic economy and financial markets.The move to select Bessent is the latest as the president-elect starts to pull together the administration for his second term in the White House. The process so far has been marked largely by a focus more on personal and political loyalty to Trump than expertise and experience.In economics, one of the main focuses and controversies of the treasury role will be to deal with Trump’s high-profile and oft-repeated promises to pursue a policy of aggressive new US tariffs in foreign trade – something that is widely feared by many other countries across the globe.Wall Street had been closely watching who Trump would pick for the treasury role, especially given his plans to remake global trade through tariffs.Bessent, 62, has advocated for tax reform and deregulation, particularly to spur more bank lending and energy production, as noted in a recent opinion piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.The stock market surge after Trump’s election victory, he wrote, signaled investor “expectations of higher growth, lower volatility and inflation, and a revitalized economy for all Americans”.Bessent follows other financial luminaries who have taken the job, including the former Goldman Sachs executives Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first treasury chief. Janet Yellen, the current secretary and first woman in the job, previously chaired the Federal Reserve and White House council of economic advisers.As the 79th treasury secretary, Bessent would essentially be the highest-ranking US economic official, responsible for maintaining the plumbing of the world’s largest economy, from collecting taxes and paying the nation’s bills to managing the $28.6tn Treasury debt market and overseeing financial regulation, including handling and preventing market crises.The treasury boss also runs US financial sanctions policy, oversees the US-led International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international financial institutions, and manages national security screenings of foreign investments in the US.Bessent would face challenges, including safely managing federal deficits that are forecast to grow by nearly $8tn over a decade due to Trump’s plans to extend expiring tax cuts next year and add generous new breaks, including ending taxes on social security income.Without offsetting revenues, this new debt would add to an unsustainable fiscal trajectory already forecast to balloon US debt by $22tn through 2033.
Managing debt increases this large without market indigestion will be a challenge, though Bessent has argued Trump’s agenda would unleash stronger economic growth that would grow revenue and shore up market confidence.Bessent would also inherit the role carved out by Yellen to lead the G7 nations to provide tens of billions of dollars in economic support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion and tighten sanctions on Moscow. But given Trump’s desire to end the war quickly and withdraw US financial support for Ukraine, it is unclear whether he would pursue this.Another area where Bessent will likely differ from Yellen is her focus on climate change, from her mandate that development banks expand lending for clean energy to incorporating climate risks into financial regulations and managing hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy tax credits.Trump, a climate-change skeptic, has vowed to increase production of USfossil fuel energy and end the clean-energy subsidies in Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.Reuters contributed to this report More

Donald Trump has chosen Russ Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, the controversial conservative plan to overhaul the government, to be director of the US Office of Management and Budget, a powerful agency that helps decide the president’s policy priorities and how to pay for them.Vought, who was OMB chief during Trump’s first term, would play a major role in setting budget priorities and implementing Trump’s campaign promise to roll back government regulations.Since Trump left office, Vought has been deeply involved in Project 2025, a series of detailed policy proposals for Trump’s second term drawn up by hundreds of high-profile conservatives.Among other measures, Project 2025 calls for a broad expansion in presidential power by boosting the number of political appointees and increasing the president’s authority over the justice department. The project also proposes enforcing laws that make it illegal to mail abortion pills over state lines, criminalizing pornography and eliminating the Department of Education.The project’s authors, Vought included, have also advocated for the reclassification of parts of the federal workforce that would give Trump the authority to fire tens of thousands of government employees.During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly denied he had any links to Project 2025, even though many of its authors were former officials from his first administration. With Vought’s selection, the president-elect has now tapped several former aides with Project 2025 links for key administration roles.During the election campaign, Trump’s Democratic opponents made a concerted effort to raise public awareness of Project 2025 among voters, warning it was a blueprint for a hard-right political shift they said would occur under Trump.Their effort succeeded in making Americans widely aware of the project’s existence, and opinion polls showed voters broadly disapproved of the effort.The Trump campaign expressed increasing annoyance with the project, repeatedly emphasizing that its proposals were separate from the campaign’s official policy platform.Vought wrote a chapter for Project 2025 centered on the management of the president’s executive office. While many of the suggestions he laid out are highly technical, they are for the most part aimed at expanding the president’s authorities and lessening the power of career civil servants.“After months of lies to the American people, Donald Trump is taking off the mask: he’s plotting a Project 2025 cabinet to enact his dangerous vision starting on day one,” said Alex Floyd, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Trump never had anything to do with Project 2025, and that all his cabinet nominees and appointments were “whole-heartedly committed to President Trump’s agenda, not the agenda of outside groups”.Vought has helped craft several executive orders that could be implemented on day one of Trump’s term, according to two people involved in the project. They include an order instituting schedule F, which would re-categorize thousands of civil servants to enable Trump to fire them should he want to, said those people, who requested anonymity to discuss the project’s internal deliberations.Trump’s other nominees with Project 2025 ties include Brendan Carr, who wrote the project’s chapter on the Federal Communications Commission. Carr is now set to lead that agency.Carr has criticized the FCC’s decision not to finalize nearly $900m in broadband subsidies for Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink, as well as the commerce department’s $42bn broadband infrastructure program and Joe Biden’s spectrum policy.Other Project 2025 contributors who have been named by Trump as officials in his new administration are Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, John Ratcliffe, his incoming CIA director and Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s choice for ambassador to Canada.Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s incoming deputy chiefs of staff, founded a conservative legal and advocacy group known as America First Legal, which contributed to the project.At the OMB, Vought will work with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to carry out Trump’s campaign pledge to slash government spending and regulations.Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by Trump to co-lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Trump has indicated will operate outside the confines of government. More