AP Photo/Matt Kelley, File
It seems the markets liked President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary: The Dow jumped nearly 400 points Monday morning and was up 0.9% by the afternoon.
OK, that’s partly just the easing of irrational fears on Wall Street about the possible impact of Trump’s tariffs, “mass deportations” and so on.
Yet Bessent is indeed a great pick — a fundamentally practical, non-ideological student of economic history who understands exactly how Trump got the US economy roaring in his first term and why Bidenomics was a disaster.
Ironically, one of his early lessons came working under George Soros back in 1992, when the investor taught the toffs at the Bank of England a billion-pound lesson in the folly of a quasi-religious devotion to fixed exchange rates.
But as the left has descended into economic lunacy (from the delusions of the so-called “New Monetary Theory” to cheering the poison of Federal Reserve “quantitative easing”), Bessent has found himself more on the right, delivering a pointed lecture to the Manhattan Institute just this June on how Trump’s “pursuit of tax reform, deregulation, and fair trade produced noninflationary growth that generated the fastest increases in real wages in a generation.”
Indeed, he’s been publicly making the case for Trumponomics for the last year, which had him on the short list for Treasury from the start.
And in a Wall Street Journal interview landing Monday, he re-embraced Trump’s agenda (including no-tax-on-tips) while outlining a “3-3-3” vision to pump another 3 million barrels of oil a day, boost economic growth to 3% via deregulation and slash the federal budget deficit to 3% of GDP by 2028.
Translation: Cheaper energy, more good jobs and a lot less inflation.
That’s an across-the-board repudiation of the Biden legacy and a love letter to working Americans — no wonder Trump picked him.