Scott Bessent’s rise through finance to the US Treasury

By Lawrence Delevingne

(Reuters) – Investor Scott Bessent has spent his career in finance, working for macro investment billionaire George Soros and noted short seller Jim Chanos, as well as running his own hedge fund. 

Bessent will take his investing knowledge down a rarefied career path that only a few other prominent Wall Street luminaries have followed: running the U.S. Treasury. Other examples of U.S. Treasury secretaries who have come from finance include Steven Mnuchin, who served under Trump in his first term, and had worked at Goldman Sachs. Henry Paulson, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush, was also a Goldman Sachs alumnus, where he had been chairman and CEO. 

Bessent has advocated for tax reform and deregulation, particularly to spur more bank lending and energy production, as noted in a recent opinion piece he wrote for The Wall Street Journal. The market’s surge after Trump’s election victory, he wrote, signaled investor “expectations of higher growth, lower volatility and inflation, and a revitalized economy for all Americans.” 

“Scott is one of the smartest and sharpest investors I’ve had the privilege to work for. Just like George Soros was, he too is typically multiple steps ahead of the market,” said Michael Oliver Weinberg, a Columbia Business School professor and investment advisor who previously worked under Bessent as a portfolio manager at Soros Fund Management.

Bessent, 62, has said his success came after growing up knowing financial anxiety. 

He grew up in the fishing village of Little River, South Carolina, where Bessent has said his father, a real estate investor, experienced booms and busts.

“I’ve known financial anxiety and I do not want that for any family,” Bessent told Trump ally Roger Stone in a recent interview on Stone’s radio show.

Bessent attended Yale College and considered journalism but, after graduating in 1984 with a degree in political science, took an internship on Wall Street. 

He worked for Chanos in the late 1980s and then joined Soros Fund Management, Soros’ famed macroeconomic investment firm. He soon helped Soros and top deputy Stanley Druckenmiller on their most famous trade – shorting the British pound in 1992, which earned the firm more than $1 billion. 

In 2015, Bessent raised $4.5 billion, including $2 billion from Soros, to launch Key Square Group, a hedge fund firm that bets on macroeconomic trends. The firm managed approximately $577 million in overall assets, as of December 2023, according to a regulatory filing.  

Bessent has said he has known the Trump family for 30 years through a friendship with Donald Trump’s late brother, Robert Trump. Bessent supported Donald Trump’s presidential run in 2016 but during this election cycle worked as a top economic advisor to the campaign in addition to being a top fundraiser.

“I was all in for President Trump. I was one of the few Wall Street people backing him,” Bessent told Stone over the weekend.