Financial Times (September 15)
“Credibility is the most precious resource a Treasury secretary has” and Scott Bessent’s has gone up in flames. “For reasons even his defenders find hard to explain, Scott Bessent has been on a credibility-spending spree. Bessent told the currency markets last week that he was ‘the house’ and warned that nobody should bet against him. But the bond markets did and he lost. What weight will traders attach to his next pronouncement?”
Tags: Bessent, Bet, Bond markets, Credibility, Currency markets, Defenders, Lost, The house, Traders, Treasury secretary, Warned
The Economist (August 29)
“The background music of Donald Trump’s second term has been the sound of norms breaking. On economic policy alone, the president has used tariffs to usurp Congress’s taxing powers and launched attack after attack on the independence of the Federal Reserve, which he accuses of keeping interest rates too high.” While it may be “tempting to tune the noise out,” the Treasury’s recent intervention in bond markets “deserves to echo far and wide.” And “so long as government debt stays high,” more of these unconventional Treasury follies will probably ensue, but America will ultimately come to “regret Scott Bessent’s bond-market misadventures.”
Tags: Attack, Background, Bessent, Bond markets, Congress, Debt, Economic policy, Federal Reserve, Government, Independence, Interest rates, Intervention, Misadventures, Noise, Norms breaking, Regret, Tariffs, Taxing powers, Treasury, Trump, Unconventional, Usurp
Bloomberg (August 6)
“With fiscal concerns, a trade war and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East also threatening to underpin inflation, some in markets are starting to reassess their taste for US bonds and the dollar amid concern that US policy is again becoming hard to decipher.” Some of those concerns have been created by Scott Bessent and Kevin Warsh, who were called “a double whammy to global markets that investors can’t ignore.” Some bond and currency investors are now “debating if it’s time to dust off last year’s ‘Sell America’ trade.”
Tags: Bessent, Big Players, Dead cat bounce, Guesses, Joint, Katayama, Manipulation, Markets, Perplexes, Underlying fundamentals, Volatility, Yen intervention
The Economist (July 18)
“It is too darn hot. On July 14th the surface temperature of Earth’s tropical and mid-latitude oceans was higher than on any other July 14th in modern records. The same was true for every other day in July, and for almost all of the days in June, too. Europe has gone through three heatwaves since May, and though the continent is better prepared for such things than it used to be, tens of thousands will have died as a result.”
Tags: Bessent, Bonds, Conflict, Currency, Decipher, Dollar, Fiscal concerns, Inflation, Investors, Markets, Middle East, Reassess, Trade war, US, Warsh
Bloomberg (April 10)
“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned Wall Street leaders to an urgent meeting on Anthropic.” The AI firm’s new Mythos system is thought to be “capable of identifying and then exploiting vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser.” The leaders, who represented global systemically important banks, were summoned “to make sure banks are aware of possible future risks… and are taking precautions to defend their systems.”
Tags: AI, Anthropic, Bessent, Exploiting, Fed, Future risks, GSIB, Identifying, Meeting, Mythos, Operating system, Powell, Treasury, Urgent, Vulnerabilities, Wall Street, Web browser
