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    Scott Bessent: billionaire hedge-fund manager who is ‘all in’ for Trump

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    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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      Trump’s picks of loyalists for financial posts ensures his economic agenda is unimpeded

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      Certain events happen during every presidential campaign. The parties crown their candidates. The candidates debate on live TV, with millions watching. Tens of millions heads to the polls. And at some point in this process, Jamie Dimon will be tipped as the next Treasury secretary.Sure enough, the veteran boss of JPMorgan Chase – Wall Street’s de facto ambassador to the world – was, indeed, linked with the role this time around as the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns mulled their options in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election.But as the world came to terms with his victory, and Trump started to piece together his administration, the president-elect made clear in a social media post that Dimon “will not be invited” to join.The people who did get the invite underline why Dimon – one of the most prominent leaders in Corporate America, and head of America’s biggest bank – did not. Considering him for a post might be a time-honored tradition, but this is not business-as-usual.Trumpvalues reputation, establishment and star power. But not as much as he values getting his way.Howard Lutnick, a long-time friend and co-chair of his transition team, remarked during the campaign that Trump “picked unfortunately” last time around. Industrial giants and former military generals did not wholeheartedly embrace his agenda.Not this time.Trump has picked Lutnick, for starters – CEO of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald – as his commerce secretary, tasked with delivering his policy on tariffs and trade.While Lutnick was reported to have directly lobbied to run the Treasury, that job went to the financier Scott Bessent, after days of jostling and speculation.With both appointments, Trump is said to have been wary of appointing a candidate who did not ardently believe in the tariffs and tax strategy at the center of his economic plan for the US.Economists have warned that the introduction of steep tariffs could reignite inflation. Budget experts have warned that Trump’s wider plans could add as much as $15tn to US debt over 10 years.The president-elect wants to keep such caution outside the tent – and has pulled together a band of staunch loyalists to drive through it.During Bessent’s campaign for the Treasury job, he loudly made the case for tariffs, dismissing economists’ warnings as “fundamentally incorrect” in a column for Fox News.Not long after a line was very publicly drawn under the talk of Dimon as Treasury secretary, the Wall Street titan appeared on stage at a summit in Lima, Peru. He wished Trump well, “but I just want to tell the president also: I haven’t had a boss in 25 years, and I’m not about ready to start”.The boss preparing to return to the White House in January has made up his mind. He does not seem prepared to hire anyone who might try to change it – on the economy, or any other key facet of his agenda.Presidential administrations are rarely a broad church. Trump appears to be building a narrow pew. More

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      Trump picks hedge-fund investor Scott Bessent for treasury secretary

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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

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      Trump selects key Project 2025 figure Russ Vought to head budget office

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      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

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      Trump picks Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary

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      Donald Trump has picked one of his biggest fundraisers for the position of commerce secretary.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire founder of the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, will be nominated to serve as one of Trump’s principal advisers on commerce and international trade.In a statement, Trump said Lutnick would “lead our Tariff and Trade agenda” in the role, and also have “direct responsibility” for the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which negotiates trade deals.The appointment hands Lutnick a key role in the implementation of Trump’s plan to impose steep universal tariffs on overseas imports. While economists and corporate leaders have warned the proposal risks increasing prices for Americans, proponents including Lutnick have claimed it will boost the US economy.The businessman, and close ally of Trump, had been tipped for the more powerful role of treasury secretary, an appointment that had the backing of another powerful Trump fundraiser, the tech billionaire Elon Musk.Scott Bessent, an investor and hedge fund manager, has been seen as Lutnick’s closest rival for the treasury. On his social media site last week, Musk wrote: “My view fwiw is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas @howardlutnick will actually enact change.”Lutnick was co-chair of Trump’s transition team. He has championed Trump’s plans to use tariffs on foreign imports to build the US economy – a plan many economists believe will lead to rising inflation. He is also a big backer of loosening regulation of cryptocurrencies.Trump has known Lutnick, whom he hailed in Tuesday’s announcement as a “dynamic force on Wall Street”, for decades. A self-described fiscal conservative and social liberal, he has donated to Democrats in the past but recently told the Wall Street Journal that “they have moved away from me”.Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. In the decades since he rebuilt the privately held company, it now employs 13,000 people, up from 2,000 before the tragedy.It is so far unclear how or if he will separate his vast business interests from his powerful government role.During a rally at Madison Square Garden last month, Lutnick was riffing on what he thinks “Make America great again” actually means when he explained when he believes the US was sufficiently great: 1900. “At the turn of the century, our economy was rocking,” he claimed. “We had no income tax, and all we had was tariffs.” More

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      Trump advisers contemplating cuts to Medicaid and other welfare programs

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      Donald Trump’s economic advisers and congressional Republicans are discussing possible cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other government welfare programmes to cover the costs of extending the president-elect’s multitrillion-dollar 2017 tax cut.The cuts could mean new work requirements and spending caps, according to the Washington Post, citing sources involved in the talks, including aides in Trump’s transition team.Extending the tax cuts – most of which are due to expire next year – could add $4tn to the national debt, which already stands at $36tn.But Republicans fear triggering a political backlash by slashing programmes that serve an estimated 70 million Americans to pay for a tax cut that disproportionately benefits the wealthy.The 2017 tax cuts were criticised for being skewed in favour of the rich, with households in the top 1% income bracket receiving a reduction of $60,000 in 2025, compared with less than $500 for those in the bottom 60%, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Trump campaigned on extending the 2017 reduction while also vowing to abolish taxes on tips for restaurant workers.Republicans support the extension but worry that the loss of revenue could add to government borrowing – prompting them to search for savings in others areas.In addition to safety net programme cuts, some Republicans are considering re-purposing clean energy funds passed by Democrats.The GOP has warned that the costs of Medicaid – whose claimants can include low-income people, newborns, people who are blind or disabled, and those suffering from certain illnesses – has ballooned with the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.Jodey Arrington, the chair of the House of Representatives’ budget committee, told reporters that a “responsible and reasonable work requirement” could save $100bn in Medicaid costs, while another $160bn could be cut by checking eligibility more than once a year.The Paragon Health Institute, a rightwing thinktank, published a study in the summer proposing other reductions that it said could save $500bn over a decade. It said rule changes to Medicaid recently enacted over the past year by the Biden administration could cost up to $135bn nationally and between $46.3bn and $82.3bn at state level over the next five years.Alterations to food stamps – officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – could take the form of limiting which items recipients can purchase with benefits or broadening work requirements. The latter proposal was floated in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for radically overhauling US government.Qualifying criteria are tailored to assist the poorest households, with eligibility determined by income and household size. A single person with no dependents needs to be earning less than $1,354 a month to qualify. A household with two or more people but earning $1,800 per month would also be eligible.The projected cuts to welfare entitlement programmes come as the Republicans prepare to control the White House and both chambers of Congress following this month’s election.It also coincides with Trump’s choice of Elon Musk, the Tesla and Space X entrepreneur, to head a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy, his former Republican primary opponent, with the brief of slashing waste from federal spending. Musk has spoken of making around $2tn in spending cuts.The US is currently running a budget deficit at around 6% of its gross domestic product. The national debt held by the public is currently worth around 97% of the national economy.The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has argued that, without major spending reductions, the deficit would widen significantly in the next 10 years, while the US national debt could soar to 143% of the economy. More

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      Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other business leaders congratulate Trump

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      Business leaders were swift to offer their congratulations to Donald Trump on his election victory, less than four years after they criticized him for his role in the January 6 insurrection.Some of tech’s business leaders, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook all publicly congratulated Trump for his win.“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos said in a statement. “No nation has bigger opportunities.”“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads. “Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”“Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration,” Cook wrote on Twitter/X.The influential Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying group with more than 200 members, who are the chief executives of companies such as JPMorgan, Walmart, Google and Pepsi, said in a statement: “Business Roundtable congratulates President-elect Donald Trump on his election as the 47th President of the United States.”“We look forward to working with the incoming Trump Administration and all federal and state policymakers,” the group said.Billionaire Mark Cuban, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was one of the first to congratulate Trump just after 1am ET.“Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square,” Cuban wrote. “Congrats to @elonmusk as well.”Elon Musk, Trump’s highest-profile business backer, celebrated with a post on X declaring victory for himself. “It is morning in America again,” he wrote. Trump has floated giving Musk an influential role in his administration.The reaction presents a stark contrast to how the leaders responded to Trump after the 2020 election. Cook had called the insurrection “a shameful chapter in our nation’s history”, while Zuckerberg said: “I believe the former president should be responsible for his words.”Bezos, meanwhile, had congratulated Joe Biden for his victory four years ago with a post. “Unity, empathy and decency are not characteristics of a bygone era,” he said on Instagram, posting a picture of Biden and Kamala Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s something of an about-face that was seen leading up to the election. Trump had started to brag that executives such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Zuckerberg were calling him, seemingly trying to rebuild relationships that had been strained during Biden’s presidency.Bezos has had a particularly fraught relationship with Trump. But in October the Bezos-owned Washington Post chose not to endorse any candidate in the US presidential election. The Post had planned to endorse the vice-president.While coalitions of former executives had endorsed Harris, and said that many CEOs were probably going to vote in support of her, the business community appears poised to transition to a second Trump term. By Wednesday afternoon, US stock markets were soaring on news of Trump’s victory.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      John Oliver on Trump’s businesses: ‘Always operating at maximum greed’

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      On the final episode of Last Week Tonight before the 2024 election, John Oliver provided one final reason not to vote for Donald Trump: his many dubious businesses, which could guide his actions if elected president again. “We’ve talked all year about the many good reasons not to vote for him: his mass deportation plans, his shaping of the courts, Project 2025, everything he said or did before his presidency, everything he said or did during his presidency, everything he said or did after his presidency and the fact that it should be unconstitutional to have a vice-president named JD,” said Oliver.But when it comes to making money as a former president, “Trump is in a category all his own”, he added.Since leaving office, Trump’s hotels have announced deals in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Vietnam. He’s hawked official Trump coins, a Trump-branded Bible, the “never surrender” high-top sneakers and “the ugliest watch I have ever seen in my life”, said Oliver. “It makes your wrist look like it’s having a midlife crisis. It looks like it was made by melting down King Charles.“The fact Trump is willing to slap his name on random products is nothing new. It’s always been part of his MO,” he continued. “But the scope of his business ventures has actually escalated sharply,” which makes sense – since leaving office, Trump has racked up millions in legal expenses and has multiple judgments worth hundreds of millions against him. “Does nearly half a billion in penalties hanging over his head make the greediest man to ever live even greedier?” Oliver wondered. “Maybe, maybe not. After all, Trump is always operating at maximum greed, the same way the ocean is always operating at maximum wet.“But it does mean that he is a little more desperate,” Oliver continued, because if Trump’s appeals fail and he doesn’t come up with the money, courts could order his assets – including his beloved Mar-a-Lago resort – seized and sold. The incentive is to make more money than even, and if he wins the election, “he’s got some troubling new ways to do that”, said Oliver.Oliver recapped the guardrails during Trump’s first term which, unfortunately, weren’t so much legal guardrails as “norms that could be ignored”. Trump wasn’t required to release his tax returns or put his assets in a blind trust, so he didn’t. “If Trump is not required to do something, he’s not doing it,” Oliver noted. “It’s why he doesn’t say he lost the last election, or hug his children, or bother to learn the fucking dance moves to YMCA – for the love of God, move your arms above your shoulders, you human pot roast.”Trump instead put his assets into a revocable trust that he could access any time, run by his sons Eric and Don Jr as well as the company CFO, Allen Weisselberg, who has gone to jail twice for lying under oath and dodging taxes.Trump also blew past whatever laws did exist over presidential finances. The emoluments clause of the US constitution forbids the president from accepting money or gifts of any kind from foreign governments unless he obtains consent of Congress to do so, but his businesses made $7.8m from 20 foreign governments during his time in office. The top spenders were China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.“In any other universe, ‘president accepts money from foreign governments’ would be immediately disqualifying,” said Oliver. “Unfortunately, we live in this universe, where a candidate for president has been criminally indicted four times and convicted of 34 felony counts thus far, his running mate sees women as walking incubators and Reba McEntire still hasn’t done Hot Ones. This is not the ideal timeline!”Trump’s financial violations during his presidency were the subject of several lawsuits, but he left office before they were settled, leading the supreme court to dismiss the matter as moot in January 2021. “Basically, he ran out the clock,” said Oliver. “So there is no evidence to suggest that Trump won’t carry on his personal enrichment during a second term.”And he has more avenues to do so, if elected again. Since leaving office, Trump launched Trump Media & Technology Group, whose flagship product is Truth Social, or as Oliver called it, “the Maga version of Twitter, a phrase that is now totally redundant”. The company is now Trump’s highest-valued financial holding by far, though that does not reflect the lackluster performance of Truth Social, which is the 1,174th most popular website in the US. But because presidents are not bound by federal conflict of interest law, Trump could use the office of the president to artificially boost the stock to his personal enrichment. American companies seeking to curry favor could buy ads on the platform and foreign governments looking to do the same could buy shares of the company.Public companies are still subject to some regulation; his ventures into crypto, on the other hand, are not. In the past two years, Trump has launched his own branded NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which have made him at least $7.2m off what Oliver declared “worthless pieces of shit”.The Trump family has also launched a vague crypto-focused company called World Liberty Financial with Trump as its “chief crypto advocate”. The company “intends to build a platform that will allow users to trade, borrow and lend cryptocurrencies”, according to its “Gold Paper”.If Trump wins, it’s expected that he will directly influence regulations – or lack thereof – of crypto companies, which one expert described as “conflict of interest 101”. “This is obviously extremely dangerous, but especially in a place that’s so new,” said Oliver. With crypto, Oliver summarized, Trump would not only be exploiting loopholes, but creating the loopholes in real time.“It was clear before Trump was elected that he’d use the presidency to enrich himself,” Oliver noted. “But in a second term, the landscape is very different. We’re no longer talking about a tacky Florida country club that CEOs or foreign officials can visit for special access to the president. It’s two new companies in branches of technology that we’re still trying to figure out how to regulate, that could expose him to new levels of risk and provide avenues for people to funnel money to him and influence him.“None of this is the biggest reason not to vote for him,” he concluded. “But it’s another good one to put alongside the many, many others.” More

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      If the US is heading for a soft landing, why do people feel so hard up?

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      The last few months have been filled with great news, according to US economists. Inflation is a hair’s breadth from pre-pandemic levels, unemployment is close to a 50-year low. The stock market keeps hitting record highs. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates last month, the first time since 2020. Some economists have gone so far as to say that the economy we’re living in is one of the best seen in decades.And yet, as the US heads to the polls, many Americans believe the economy stinks. It’s a disconnect that could ultimately decide who takes the White House.Paul Spehar, 62, a maintenance technician based in Daytona Beach, Florida, has seen reports that the economy is doing well but has only seen his savings chip away. His car insurance tripled over the last three years, and he had to take on $2,000 in debt to pay for the copay of a recent surgery. When Spehar retires, he will have to rely solely on Social Security.“The system doesn’t work for people like me,” Spehar said.It’s a common sentiment. In a Harris Poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian in September, nearly 50% of Americans believed that the country is experiencing a recession. Over 60% believed that inflation is increasing, and 50% believed that unemployment is increasing too. Even those who may know what the economists are saying don’t feel great: 73% said it’s hard to feel good about any positive economic news when they feel financially squeezed each month.As election day draws closer, and voters consistently say that the economy is their number one issue, the stakes of understanding why voters feel so blue has never been higher. So why do economists and everyday Americans seem to live in two different realities? The answer may come down to how they view inflation.For economists, inflation is a “nominal thing”, said Stefanie Stantcheva, an economist at Harvard. In other words, for economists, inflation is a measure – an important measure, especially for the Federal Reserve, which is tasked with adjusting monetary to control inflation. But for everyday Americans, inflation is a lived experience.“[Lived experiences] teach us a lot, and they show us that people are suffering a lot from inflation, perhaps more than the baseline numbers say,” Stantcheva said. “I think it’s very important to not just look at that number and say ‘Oh, but this is what CPI [the consumer price index, a broad measure of inflation] says.’… People have a different experience from that, and those experiences should be taken seriously.”That “nominal” number elicits feelings of anger, fear, anxiety and stress – along with a sense of inequality and injustice, when people are asked open-ended questions about how inflation makes them feel, said Stantcheva.People “think that wages are not keeping pace with prices at all, and so their standards of living are eroding,” Stantcheva said. “Inflation affects us as consumers, as workers, as asset holders, and also emotionally. And we see that lots of people, especially lower-income ones.”Inflation peaked in the summer of 2022 at 9.1% – the highest it had been since the early ’80s. It would take over two years for inflation to get back to levels under 3%. The Federal Reserve started ratcheting up interest rates, making the cost of borrowing money more expensive, to tackle rising prices. It has worked, but for many, the economic data and the reality of lived experiences have diverged.For economists, it seems likely that the Federal Reserve pulled off what they call a “soft-landing” – a rare feat where inflation goes down, but the unemployment rate remains relatively low. The opposite, a “hard-landing” – which many economists had forecast – would have meant that unemployment would go up as inflation goes down, triggering a recession.But for many Americans, this is anything but a soft-landing.Inflation coming down doesn’t mean prices have come down, which would be deflation, something economic theory says would actually be a bad sign for the economy. So prices have and will remain elevated. Food prices, for example, went up 25% between 2019 and 2023, according to the US Department of Agriculture.The impact of higher interest rates has also taken time to ripple through the economy, so in addition to inflation, Americans are also still getting hit with high interest rates. As prices increased, so did the cost of buying a home, getting a loan for a car and the rates on credit card bills.What economists call a soft-landing “is diametrically opposed to ordinary Americans, who see themselves in the middle of turbulence”, said John Gerzema, CEO of Harris Poll.While economists – and the Biden administration – celebrate low unemployment, it’s harder for everyday Americans to appreciate the good news even if they still have their jobs.“Unemployment is highly personal when it happens to you,” Gerzema said. But for most people, unemployment is not a big factor in their lives. “But inflation is personal and persistent. Every week it’s changing your benchmark.”MaryKate, 25, who requested she be identified by only her first name for fear of professional repercussions, said that she is still living at home with her parents because rent has been too expensive. When she graduated from college in 2021, it took her a year to find a full-time job with benefits, and saving up to move out has been hard. She recently got financing for a new car, which she uses to commute to work.“I didn’t intend to be at home for this long,” MaryKate said. “It’s hindering my personal growth.”MaryKate said she thinks about how her parents were able to move up from the lower middle-class to a middle-class during their life, and doesn’t feel like the mobility they experienced is possible for her.“At least in my family, that was kind of always the thought, that the next generation does better than the previous one,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to be the case for me.”It’s a sentiment that many Americans share. In the September Harris/Guardian poll, 42% of Americans said they are not financially better off today than their parents were at their age.The one thing that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris seem to agree on is that inflation has hurt Americans, and they are acting accordingly. It’s why Trump proposed ending taxes on tips at a rally in Las Vegas and Harris has shifted her emphasis away from Bidenomics – investing in infrastructure, boosting the US chip industry – to putting housing costs and crackdowns on price gouging at the center of her economic proposals.Gerzema says these kinds of policies are “personally relevant appeals” that focus on the granular “pixels” of the economy, not the overall picture. Purchasing power, personal sentiment on job security, student loans, the price of gas – are all pixels that make up the picture of a person’s individual economy.“I think the pixels just become so incredibly important because when you look at those, you really start to understand a different picture,” Gerzema said.Both presidential candidates seem to understand that much of the election hinges on these emotions. This week, voters will choose who they think has understood them best. More