November 25, 2024 • 14 mins
After a messy, public competition between hopefuls, President-elect Donald Trump nominated hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to be the next Treasury secretary.
On today’s Big Take DC podcast, hosts Saleha Mohsin and David Gura discuss why Trump chose Bessent, and how Bessent might approach the job.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The Hedgehound manager Scott
Bessont is President elect Donald Trump's pick to be the
next Secretary of the Treasury, and he finally got the
nod after a very public and kind of messy competition.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It was a knife fight for a very stressful job.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Bloomberg Sileia Mosen covered that contest as it played out
on television, on obed pages and at mar A Lago,
where Trump has been preparing for his second term, and
it dragged on for weeks.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Scott Bessant looked like he was tipped to get the
job easy pas and then he left town. He left
Palm Beach, and Howard Lutnick, the co chair of Trump's
transition efforts and CEO of Canter Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
He moved in, and Seleia says he.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Had Lutnick out there talking and having his allies come
in for him and against Bessett, and then you had
Beston doing the same thing.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
That strategy backfired. Seleia says it made the President elect
so irritated that he brought in more candidates, including Kevin Walsh,
a former Federal Reserve governor, and Mark Rowan, the CEO
of Apollo Global Management. In the end, Trump nominated Lutnick
to run the Commerce Department. Worsh reportedly said he's more
interested in the job of FED chair when that opens up.
(01:18):
So Bessent got Treasury. What was it that sort of
tipped things in his favor at the end? How did
he win?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It might have been that no one really other than
bessn't really wowed Trump.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Trump has picked someone who knows Wall Street and that
seems to have impressed Wall Street. Stocks rose and the
dollar weakened after the President elect announced his decision. I'm
David Gura, and this is the Big Take DC from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show, I'm joined by my
co host Seliah Mosen to talk through who is Scott
(01:53):
Bessant and if he's confirmed by the US Senate, how
will he approach the job and advance his boss's Economica Jet.
So President elect Trump made this announcement after the market
closed on a Friday. I think I got the email
at six fifty five Eastern time. As you and our
colleagues have talked to investors, what are they telling you
(02:15):
about the president Elex Pick?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Markets seem happy they see Bessant as bringing stability, which
is something that we had in Trump one point zero.
You know, as much turnover as you saw in Trump's cabinet.
Steve Emnution's state as treasure secretary for all four years,
and he was able to leverage relationships because people knew
this man is going to stay and he understands the
plumbing of the global financial system. You know, that's something
(02:39):
that markets really want. They want stability, and if Bessont
can somehow manage to provide that, I think he'll end
up being a successful treasure secretary.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
What kind of career has Scott Bessont had up to
this point. What's his background?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, so he worked for George Soros. He was involved
in the investor bet that broke the pound in the
early nineties, and so he comes with a keen interest
in current policy and you could tell he talks about
that a lot, and Donald Trump talks about dollar policy
a lot. He also set up and ran his own
hedge fund since about twenty fifteen or sixteen, I think
(03:12):
he has been overseeing that and it was about a
year or a little over a year ago that he
re entered Trump's orbit and started looking at Trump's policies
and saw that Trump's stock was going to go up,
and he was right.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
You said, re entered Trump's orbit. When did they meet?
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So Bessen told me that he has known the Trump
family for like thirty years, and I think he knew
Trump's brother and so he said, oh, well, Donald Trump
probably knew my face but didn't quite know exactly who
I was. But he was close to Donald Trump Junior.
That was sort of his door into Trump world about
a year ago, and that's how he got a first
meeting with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What do your sources say about how the work that
he's done so working with these big hedge funds is
likely to shape his perspective on this job, And maybe
would just be useful for you to describe all that
a Treasury secretary has to do. It's a huge remit.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, it's huge. People like to call the Treasure secretary
the chief financial officer of the United States, but that
actually only refers to one third of the job. A
charge secretary oversees debt issuance, and that's somewhere we could
see from a Treasury secretary, Scott Vesant, a little bit
of creativity maybe in how our massive deficit is issued
and how that's structured and sort of the tenor of
(04:23):
notes and things. He's also going to be involved in
tax policy and financial stability, international economic diplomacy, so being
the representative for that at G seven and G twenty meetings,
and then the other big component is national security and
foreign policy by way of economic sanctions.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
As you talk to investors about him, do any of
them express any reservations about him not having experience in Washington,
not being a creature of DC, not being someone like
Janet Yellen, for instance, who spent the book of her
career in Washington in a lot of these big, high
profile jobs, doing quite a bit of manager.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So there's always a steeplering curve for a Treasure secretary,
particularly when it comes to dealings with Congress. The example
that comes up frequently, a more recent kind of screw
up there or confusion or misreading of the room is
Stephen Mnusian. I think it was twenty seventeen. He had
to raise the debt ceiling, and he went into a
room full of Republican lawmakers and it was a private conference,
(05:24):
and said, just raise the debt ceiling for me, and
they burst out of that room telling every reporter that
this is what he said for me. We're not going
to do it for you. We served the American people,
not you, and it was such a blunder, you know.
Stephn Mnustion came in. He didn't know any lawmakers very
closely or how all this stuff really worked from a
Washington perspective. Did not have experience in the public sector.
(05:48):
Tim Geitner knew. He came from the Federal Reserve. He'd
been at Treasury as a civil servant in the nineties.
Hank Pulson had no experience on that front. You know,
you would hope people like that they come in without
hubris of knowing what you don't know and then relying
on people to help you navigate, and also just understanding
that you come from a world where it's about relationships
and deal making and just learning on the fly. Bessant
(06:11):
comes from Wall Street, but he doesn't have the same
experience of some of the big heavyweights that we've seen
as Treasury Secretary, So Bob Rubin, Hank Paulson, Stephen Mnushan,
they loomed large because of their Goldman experience. Paulson, he
was CEO, and he said that something about the way
(06:31):
at Goldman you learn about serving the client, not serving
your own ego, really prepared him to work in government
where his biggest client was the president. So Besson't doesn't
come from that sort of traditional part of Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
After the break, what we know about how aligned Bessont
is with Tromp and what that could tell us about
how Besont may approach the role of Treasury Secretary. Scott Besson,
president elect Donald Trump's nominee to be the next Treasury Secretary,
(07:07):
helped Trump hone his messaging about the economy on the
campaign trail, and when Trump announced he'd picked Besson to
lead Treasury, he said, he will quote support my policies
that will drive US competitiveness and stop unfair trade imbalances,
work to create an economy that places growth at the forefront,
especially through our coming World Energy dominance. How much uncertainty
(07:29):
ether Seleia about where Scott Besson stands on the President
of Elect's biggest economic priorities.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
We know quite a bit, David, because Beston was kind
of openly auditioning for this role. He would meet with reporters,
do ed boards. He's written op eds for the journal
for the economists for Fox talking about different policies. I
think it was Friday, November fifteenth, Bessant wrote an op
ed talking about how supportive he is of tariffs as
a tool of foreign policy, trade policy, national security, and
(07:58):
so markets now are digging into those comments things that
he's said. They kind of see someone with a Wall
Street pedigree like Bessint as someone who might be a
bit of a hindrance to Trump's more protectionists or populist tendencies.
But that's the open question to me is how much, say,
(08:18):
will Scott Besson as treasure Secretary have over tariffs. If
you have Howard Lutnik over at Commerce, who's also overseeing USTR,
the US Trade Representative's office, to focus on tariffs in trade,
I think markets should kind of keep an eye on
how much sway Bessant really has with tariffs.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
We had this knife fight play out in the run
up to these nominations of Howard Lutnik and Scott Besson.
Are people confident that the fight ends there, that when
that moves into the cabinet room, we're not going to
see the same kind of fighting.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
No, people are not confident in that at all. In
the first administration. We saw these kinds of knife fights
play out and cabinet officers leaking to the press or
going on Fox News to make their case for the
policy that they want implemented over someone else, and it.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Doesn't always bode well. Lutnik has secured a pretty big job.
He has Commerce Secretary. He's also overseeing USTR and that's
a new idea. Trump decided to put that under lutnix purview.
So the two men do not get along. That's why
it didn't turn out where one is any c director
and one's Treasury Secretary, because Trump and the team realize
(09:27):
these two men can't work together.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Scott Beson said in an interview over the weekend, his
top priority is going to be taxes. Is he going
beyond just pushing for the continuation of the so called
Trump tax cuts? Is it bigger than that? Oh?
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I have so many questions on how tax policy is
going to unfold, because you know, the first hundred day
plan is a huge thing that we're going to be
watching for as we see officials rolled out and policy
plans rolled out and signals. Given Trump's twenty seventeen tax cuts,
some of those tax cut expire at the end of
twenty twenty five. Republicans own Congress both chambers in their hands,
(10:04):
so let's see how far they can get. But I
don't know that Bessett has said anything grave detail about
where that would go. We know publicly Donald Trump has
talked about a lot of different kinds of tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Bessant is someone who has not shied away from talking
about the deficit. He talked about it during an interview
on Bloomberg Television back in October.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
I am very concerned about what is happening right now.
We have never had a budget deficit like this. We
are at seven percent of GDP in terms of the deficit.
We've never had this when it's not a recession, not
a war. And what do we have to show for it?
Speaker 1 (10:39):
How does he plan to reduce the size of the deficit.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, I love deficit talk because everyone comes up with
these great ideas of how to reduce the deficit. But
Congress needs to do that right A charge secretary can
lead the charge. Congress is the keeper of the purse
when it comes to spending in taxes. Anytime an administration
where government has accomplished that, it is because Wall Street
or investors or markets have thrown a tantrum that you
(11:03):
have too much deficit. And I don't see how a
Trump administration or Congress makes the very difficult trade offs
and cuts in spending that will be unpopular with voters
unless they can blame it on markets or blame it
on someone else.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Scott Beson's going to play a role in picking the
next chair of the Federals or of advising the president
elect on that, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Let's talk about the Fed. Donald Trump thinks that presidents
should have a say on interest rates. We don't know
what that really means, and so I don't know. Maybe
this is some kind of creative thinking on Beson's part
to say, Okay, look, he really wants to fire the Powell,
or he really wants to set monetary policy.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Or have a say.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Maybe the way to do it where we're not just
causing a constitutional and markets crisis by sacking the Federal
Reserve chair. We do it by creating this shadow FED
chair situation where you nominate or announce the name of
who you will pick sent to to the Senenate for
confirmation to be the next Federal Reserve chair, and that
person is providing forward guidance on what they would do,
(12:06):
so markets start to look to that person's comments over
the sitting Federal Reserve chair. But this is my number
one question to Scott Beson right now is like, how
would that play out? And how seriously should we take
this plan effectively.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Like a fed chair and waiting. Yeah, you covered the
Treasury Department when Steve Mnuchin was running it, and he
was there, as you said, for all four years of
Donald Trump's first term. If Scott Best is confirmed, what
is going to determine how successful he is at the
job with Trump?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
It's always maintaining Trump's trust and always making sure you're
aware of who he's meeting with, and trying to be
the last person in the room. As Best learned when
he left Palm Beach and thought that he had bagged
the job of Treasure secretary and then it kind of
blew up. Mnusian learned that Steven Mnushan learned that if
you leave the president with Peter Navarro, then the trade
(12:55):
advisor and like a known China hawk in the room
with President two long, Trump is going to start asking
questions like can we aggressively intervene in the US dollar
to make it weaker and can we do X, Y
and Z that might really blow up foreign relations or
economic relations with other countries. So I think Scott has
some have to learn sort of to make sure that
(13:16):
you stay in the good graces of the president, stay visible,
and are keeping tabs and keeping treasury related policies firmly
in the hands of the Treasure Department and not let
others encroach on that remit.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode was produced by
Julia Press. It was mixed by Alex Secura and fact
checked by Adriana Tapia. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny
and Sarah Halzac. Elizabeth Ponso and Wendy Benjaminson provide editorial direction.
Naomi Shaven is our senior producer. Nicole Beamster Bor is
(13:52):
our executive producer. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll
be back tomorrow MHM.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The Hedgehound manager Scott
Bessont is President elect Donald Trump's pick to be the
next Secretary of the Treasury, and he finally got the
nod after a very public and kind of messy competition.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It was a knife fight for a very stressful job.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Bloomberg Sileia Mosen covered that contest as it played out
on television, on obed pages and at mar A Lago,
where Trump has been preparing for his second term, and
it dragged on for weeks.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Scott Bessant looked like he was tipped to get the
job easy pas and then he left town. He left
Palm Beach, and Howard Lutnick, the co chair of Trump's
transition efforts and CEO of Canter Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
He moved in, and Seleia says he.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Had Lutnick out there talking and having his allies come
in for him and against Bessett, and then you had
Beston doing the same thing.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
That strategy backfired. Seleia says it made the President elect
so irritated that he brought in more candidates, including Kevin Walsh,
a former Federal Reserve governor, and Mark Rowan, the CEO
of Apollo Global Management. In the end, Trump nominated Lutnick
to run the Commerce Department. Worsh reportedly said he's more
interested in the job of FED chair when that opens up.
(01:18):
So Bessent got Treasury. What was it that sort of
tipped things in his favor at the end? How did
he win?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It might have been that no one really other than
bessn't really wowed Trump.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Trump has picked someone who knows Wall Street and that
seems to have impressed Wall Street. Stocks rose and the
dollar weakened after the President elect announced his decision. I'm
David Gura, and this is the Big Take DC from
Bloomberg News Today. On the show, I'm joined by my
co host Seliah Mosen to talk through who is Scott
(01:53):
Bessant and if he's confirmed by the US Senate, how
will he approach the job and advance his boss's Economica Jet.
So President elect Trump made this announcement after the market
closed on a Friday. I think I got the email
at six fifty five Eastern time. As you and our
colleagues have talked to investors, what are they telling you
(02:15):
about the president Elex Pick?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Markets seem happy they see Bessant as bringing stability, which
is something that we had in Trump one point zero.
You know, as much turnover as you saw in Trump's cabinet.
Steve Emnution's state as treasure secretary for all four years,
and he was able to leverage relationships because people knew
this man is going to stay and he understands the
plumbing of the global financial system. You know, that's something
(02:39):
that markets really want. They want stability, and if Bessont
can somehow manage to provide that, I think he'll end
up being a successful treasure secretary.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
What kind of career has Scott Bessont had up to
this point. What's his background?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, so he worked for George Soros. He was involved
in the investor bet that broke the pound in the
early nineties, and so he comes with a keen interest
in current policy and you could tell he talks about
that a lot, and Donald Trump talks about dollar policy
a lot. He also set up and ran his own
hedge fund since about twenty fifteen or sixteen, I think
(03:12):
he has been overseeing that and it was about a
year or a little over a year ago that he
re entered Trump's orbit and started looking at Trump's policies
and saw that Trump's stock was going to go up,
and he was right.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
You said, re entered Trump's orbit. When did they meet?
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So Bessen told me that he has known the Trump
family for like thirty years, and I think he knew
Trump's brother and so he said, oh, well, Donald Trump
probably knew my face but didn't quite know exactly who
I was. But he was close to Donald Trump Junior.
That was sort of his door into Trump world about
a year ago, and that's how he got a first
meeting with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
What do your sources say about how the work that
he's done so working with these big hedge funds is
likely to shape his perspective on this job, And maybe
would just be useful for you to describe all that
a Treasury secretary has to do. It's a huge remit.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, it's huge. People like to call the Treasure secretary
the chief financial officer of the United States, but that
actually only refers to one third of the job. A
charge secretary oversees debt issuance, and that's somewhere we could
see from a Treasury secretary, Scott Vesant, a little bit
of creativity maybe in how our massive deficit is issued
and how that's structured and sort of the tenor of
(04:23):
notes and things. He's also going to be involved in
tax policy and financial stability, international economic diplomacy, so being
the representative for that at G seven and G twenty meetings,
and then the other big component is national security and
foreign policy by way of economic sanctions.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
As you talk to investors about him, do any of
them express any reservations about him not having experience in Washington,
not being a creature of DC, not being someone like
Janet Yellen, for instance, who spent the book of her
career in Washington in a lot of these big, high
profile jobs, doing quite a bit of manager.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
So there's always a steeplering curve for a Treasure secretary,
particularly when it comes to dealings with Congress. The example
that comes up frequently, a more recent kind of screw
up there or confusion or misreading of the room is
Stephen Mnusian. I think it was twenty seventeen. He had
to raise the debt ceiling, and he went into a
room full of Republican lawmakers and it was a private conference,
(05:24):
and said, just raise the debt ceiling for me, and
they burst out of that room telling every reporter that
this is what he said for me. We're not going
to do it for you. We served the American people,
not you, and it was such a blunder, you know.
Stephn Mnustion came in. He didn't know any lawmakers very
closely or how all this stuff really worked from a
Washington perspective. Did not have experience in the public sector.
(05:48):
Tim Geitner knew. He came from the Federal Reserve. He'd
been at Treasury as a civil servant in the nineties.
Hank Pulson had no experience on that front. You know,
you would hope people like that they come in without
hubris of knowing what you don't know and then relying
on people to help you navigate, and also just understanding
that you come from a world where it's about relationships
and deal making and just learning on the fly. Bessant
(06:11):
comes from Wall Street, but he doesn't have the same
experience of some of the big heavyweights that we've seen
as Treasury Secretary, So Bob Rubin, Hank Paulson, Stephen Mnushan,
they loomed large because of their Goldman experience. Paulson, he
was CEO, and he said that something about the way
(06:31):
at Goldman you learn about serving the client, not serving
your own ego, really prepared him to work in government
where his biggest client was the president. So Besson't doesn't
come from that sort of traditional part of Wall Street.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
After the break, what we know about how aligned Bessont
is with Tromp and what that could tell us about
how Besont may approach the role of Treasury Secretary. Scott Besson,
president elect Donald Trump's nominee to be the next Treasury Secretary,
(07:07):
helped Trump hone his messaging about the economy on the
campaign trail, and when Trump announced he'd picked Besson to
lead Treasury, he said, he will quote support my policies
that will drive US competitiveness and stop unfair trade imbalances,
work to create an economy that places growth at the forefront,
especially through our coming World Energy dominance. How much uncertainty
(07:29):
ether Seleia about where Scott Besson stands on the President
of Elect's biggest economic priorities.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
We know quite a bit, David, because Beston was kind
of openly auditioning for this role. He would meet with reporters,
do ed boards. He's written op eds for the journal
for the economists for Fox talking about different policies. I
think it was Friday, November fifteenth, Bessant wrote an op
ed talking about how supportive he is of tariffs as
a tool of foreign policy, trade policy, national security, and
(07:58):
so markets now are digging into those comments things that
he's said. They kind of see someone with a Wall
Street pedigree like Bessint as someone who might be a
bit of a hindrance to Trump's more protectionists or populist tendencies.
But that's the open question to me is how much, say,
(08:18):
will Scott Besson as treasure Secretary have over tariffs. If
you have Howard Lutnik over at Commerce, who's also overseeing USTR,
the US Trade Representative's office, to focus on tariffs in trade,
I think markets should kind of keep an eye on
how much sway Bessant really has with tariffs.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
We had this knife fight play out in the run
up to these nominations of Howard Lutnik and Scott Besson.
Are people confident that the fight ends there, that when
that moves into the cabinet room, we're not going to
see the same kind of fighting.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
No, people are not confident in that at all. In
the first administration. We saw these kinds of knife fights
play out and cabinet officers leaking to the press or
going on Fox News to make their case for the
policy that they want implemented over someone else, and it.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Doesn't always bode well. Lutnik has secured a pretty big job.
He has Commerce Secretary. He's also overseeing USTR and that's
a new idea. Trump decided to put that under lutnix purview.
So the two men do not get along. That's why
it didn't turn out where one is any c director
and one's Treasury Secretary, because Trump and the team realize
(09:27):
these two men can't work together.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Scott Beson said in an interview over the weekend, his
top priority is going to be taxes. Is he going
beyond just pushing for the continuation of the so called
Trump tax cuts? Is it bigger than that? Oh?
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
I have so many questions on how tax policy is
going to unfold, because you know, the first hundred day
plan is a huge thing that we're going to be
watching for as we see officials rolled out and policy
plans rolled out and signals. Given Trump's twenty seventeen tax cuts,
some of those tax cut expire at the end of
twenty twenty five. Republicans own Congress both chambers in their hands,
(10:04):
so let's see how far they can get. But I
don't know that Bessett has said anything grave detail about
where that would go. We know publicly Donald Trump has
talked about a lot of different kinds of tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Bessant is someone who has not shied away from talking
about the deficit. He talked about it during an interview
on Bloomberg Television back in October.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
I am very concerned about what is happening right now.
We have never had a budget deficit like this. We
are at seven percent of GDP in terms of the deficit.
We've never had this when it's not a recession, not
a war. And what do we have to show for it?
Speaker 1 (10:39):
How does he plan to reduce the size of the deficit.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, I love deficit talk because everyone comes up with
these great ideas of how to reduce the deficit. But
Congress needs to do that right A charge secretary can
lead the charge. Congress is the keeper of the purse
when it comes to spending in taxes. Anytime an administration
where government has accomplished that, it is because Wall Street
or investors or markets have thrown a tantrum that you
(11:03):
have too much deficit. And I don't see how a
Trump administration or Congress makes the very difficult trade offs
and cuts in spending that will be unpopular with voters
unless they can blame it on markets or blame it
on someone else.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Scott Beson's going to play a role in picking the
next chair of the Federals or of advising the president
elect on that, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Let's talk about the Fed. Donald Trump thinks that presidents
should have a say on interest rates. We don't know
what that really means, and so I don't know. Maybe
this is some kind of creative thinking on Beson's part
to say, Okay, look, he really wants to fire the Powell,
or he really wants to set monetary policy.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Or have a say.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Maybe the way to do it where we're not just
causing a constitutional and markets crisis by sacking the Federal
Reserve chair. We do it by creating this shadow FED
chair situation where you nominate or announce the name of
who you will pick sent to to the Senenate for
confirmation to be the next Federal Reserve chair, and that
person is providing forward guidance on what they would do,
(12:06):
so markets start to look to that person's comments over
the sitting Federal Reserve chair. But this is my number
one question to Scott Beson right now is like, how
would that play out? And how seriously should we take
this plan effectively.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Like a fed chair and waiting. Yeah, you covered the
Treasury Department when Steve Mnuchin was running it, and he
was there, as you said, for all four years of
Donald Trump's first term. If Scott Best is confirmed, what
is going to determine how successful he is at the
job with Trump?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
It's always maintaining Trump's trust and always making sure you're
aware of who he's meeting with, and trying to be
the last person in the room. As Best learned when
he left Palm Beach and thought that he had bagged
the job of Treasure secretary and then it kind of
blew up. Mnusian learned that Steven Mnushan learned that if
you leave the president with Peter Navarro, then the trade
(12:55):
advisor and like a known China hawk in the room
with President two long, Trump is going to start asking
questions like can we aggressively intervene in the US dollar
to make it weaker and can we do X, Y
and Z that might really blow up foreign relations or
economic relations with other countries. So I think Scott has
some have to learn sort of to make sure that
(13:16):
you stay in the good graces of the president, stay visible,
and are keeping tabs and keeping treasury related policies firmly
in the hands of the Treasure Department and not let
others encroach on that remit.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. This episode was produced by
Julia Press. It was mixed by Alex Secura and fact
checked by Adriana Tapia. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny
and Sarah Halzac. Elizabeth Ponso and Wendy Benjaminson provide editorial direction.
Naomi Shaven is our senior producer. Nicole Beamster Bor is
(13:52):
our executive producer. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts.
Please follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen
to podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show. We'll
be back tomorrow MHM.
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