Bessent

I hope they told him to shove his arrogant prissy face up his a-hole.

I cannot abide this prissy, arrogant asshole.  Should Putin, god forbid, march into Boston - or wherever Bessent lives - I hope the first house they go to his.

UPDATE 09/25/2025:

Bessent, who made a fortune in finance, is not dumb. Nor is he, having once backed Al Gore and worked for George Soros, a MAGA cultist. He even appears to have held some principles, as demonstrated by his reported teenage decision not to seek appointment to the US Naval Academy because he wouldn’t lie about his homosexuality.

[...]

Bessent pronounced the president’s feckless Alaska summit, where he applauded Vladimir Putin like a fan-boy, a “show of force.” He praised Trump as “probably the most economically sophisticated president we’ve had in 100 years, maybe ever.”

Go ahead and laugh. It’s really dumb, since Trump quite obviously is an ignorant, destructive, pathologically insecure buffoon mimicking the autocrats he admires.

But acknowledging reality out loud precludes service in Trump 2.0. As Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and aide to President George W. Bush, “The punishment for failure to tell lies in this administration is extremely high.”

[...]

With [Argentina's] economy struggling and currency weakening, Bessent pledged robust American financial support to help assure that “Argentina will be Great Again.”

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Trump’s erratic tariffs cloud business planning while imposing inflation-boosting taxes on American companies and the working class. His deportations constrain growth by reducing labor supply. His tax cuts for the wealthy put upward pressure on interest rates by ballooning budget deficits. [Bessent] won’t admit that tariffs tax Americans, not foreigners.

He touts a Trump-sparked manufacturing revival, even as manufacturing employment falls.

He claims the president inherited a “financial shambles” from Joe Biden and pulled the economy “back from the edge.”

That’s dumb. The Economist magazine last year pronounced America’s post-pandemic recovery “the envy of the world.” Now, says Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi, we stand “on the edge of a recession - in fact, we may already be in one.”

[...]

MAGA zealot Steve Bannon told the Washington Post that Bessent called Elon Musk a “total fraud” in a White House confrontation over the Department of Government Efficiency’s failure to identify much wasteful spending.

Politico recently reported that Bessent angrily accused Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, of bad-mouthing him to Trump. “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face,” Bessent threatened. (Since then, he’s gotten more cause for fisticuffs. Pulte, acting as a White House henchman, has been trying to drum up mortgage fraud prosecutions against several Trump political adversaries. It turns out that the misconduct Pulte has alleged – identifying two different homes as a “primary residence” on mortgage documents – is something Bessent himself has done, according to a Bloomberg report.)

  Zeteo

Okay, wait a minute. I have to comment on the face punching comment. Can you see Mr. Priss convicingly saying that, much less actually throwing a punch?

“His job is to make sure that the markets don’t freak out,” observes Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers in Barack Obama’s White House. “Keeping people happy without getting elites to revolt is the entire trick of a populist government.”

[...]

The crude White House challenge to Federal Reserve independence endangers that [...] . Trump routinely berates Chairman Jerome Powell, his own 2017 appointee, for failing to offset administration errors with interest rate cuts. Pulte ginned up allegations of “mortgage fraud” as a pretext for Trump to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, though for now, courts have blocked the firing.

Bessent has piled on to the Fed while trying to look high-minded about it. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, he indicted the central bank in MAGA-friendly terms by likening its monetary policy to the “gain of function” viral research that right-wingers insist caused COVID.

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Bessent’s handling of the search [for a Fed chair replacement] will test his ability to safeguard our economic stability.

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Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has accused Bessent of “running interference for pedophiles” by refusing to provide Congress with Treasury financial records related to Epstein’s sex-trafficking.

[...]

When Treasury, at Trump’s behest, asked the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers wrote on social media that “any self-respecting Treasury Secretary would resign” rather than go along.

Kind of obvious Bessent has no self-respect.