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

Hedge fund manager Scott Bessent is an odd pick for Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, but he is seen as the more reasonable and pragmatic of the candidates

Scott Bessent of Key Square Group LP, during an interview in Washington
(Image credit: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

Sign up

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.