Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is repeating the same doomed bond-market play he once got rich betting against, according to an economic analyst.
Catherine Rampell, economics editor at The Bulwark, made the case on an episode of her podcast “Receipts” on Tuesday as she and journalist Sam Stein picked apart Bessent’s recent interview with Axios, in which he stood by telling markets last month, “I am the house now.”
“No, ’cause look, the house doesn’t win every hand,” Bessent told Axios. “The house plays the percentages.” He conceded he may have “hurt some fragile egos on Wall Street.”
Rampell argued the bravado misses an irony rooted in Bessent’s own resume. His reputation for market savvy traces to the 1990s, when he urged George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller to bet against the British pound as the Bank of England tried to prop it up against the market fundamentals.
“At the time, a very young Scott Bessent was like, ‘They can’t do it, let’s bet against them,’ and he was right,” Rampell said. “He seems to fail to understand the parallel today. This is like a very, very similar situation.”
“Back then, the house was the Bank of England, and markets were right, as Bessent learned,” she continued. “Now the roles have reversed, and he seems to fail to recognize that he is trying to do a similarly futile experiment.”
The market, Rampell said, “bet against him and seems to have won.”
Rampell also took aim at Bessent’s claim that money management offers a fair “scorecard” for judging performance, noting that his own record soured after his early wins with Soros and Druckenmiller.
“If there is a scorecard on his performance as a money manager, it doesn’t look so great,” she said. “But again, there is like no self-awareness about any of this.”
Stein noted that Bessent “lost 90 percent of his funds when he was running a hedge fund” and said that “by and large it does seem like interventions have not done what he wanted to do.”
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