Scott Bessent Can’t Stop Failing.

At some point a rational person would look at a near-perfect record of failure and, at a minimum, ask “Is it me?” Treasury secretary Scott Bessent apparently does not possess this trait. Self-reflection won’t be on his CV after his tenure. He’s become somewhat of an obsession because of an incompetence matched only by his arrogance.

We should not know this much about the Secretary of the Treasury. We certainly shouldn’t hear this much from one. And yet, we are treated weekly to the admonitions, lectures and testimonies of the most arrogant man in this administration—an administration that includes Stephen Miller and RFK Jr., to give you an idea of this claim. Everything he touches turns to absolute shit.

Let’s go through his recent maneuvers and how the market keeps bitch-slapping this guy.

First off there’s the yen intervention. Quick recap on this. The yen has been sliding in 2026 and that’s a problem for the United States, because the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) response to this has been to increase interest rates. Japan has legitimate reasons for this. Because it relies heavily on imports, a devalued yen makes imports more expensive, i.e., inflationary. So for the first time in many, many years the Japanese people are getting hit with domestic inflation. Sounds like a them problem, right?

Where it comes back to us is in the Treasury market because they’re the number one foreign owner of U.S. debt. If interest rates climb in Japan, it makes Japanese bonds more attractive. That’s the long and short of it. There’s another element to it called the “carry trade,” which we’ve covered before, but it’s too in the weeds for right now. The bottom line is that we’ve treated Japan as a client state since the Plaza Accords, creating the conditions for low growth in the Japanese economy and incentives for Japan’s central bank to purchase U.S. debt. Whether this was directly responsible for Japan’s “lost decades” since then remains hotly debated.

So Bessent made this big announcement a few weeks ago that he’s coming to the rescue selling euros to purchase yen. It didn’t work. To be fair, the yen has strengthened over the past several days, but it remains undervalued relative to prior periods. And most believe it’s the BOJ quietly maneuvering in the background, not Bessent’s lame attempt to manipulate the yen.

That didn’t stop Secretary Smugface from telling an audience at SMU the other day that no one should bet against him because he’s “the house” and has asymmetric information.

Needless to say, the market hated that statement.

Bessent went on to suggest that he has inside information as to what the Bank of Japan will do. This also did not go over well as the market has begun to ignore him completely. And for good reason. He doesn’t know what his own central bank is going to do, let alone what Japan’s is going to do.

Understand that, with rare exceptions, the financial media is extremely polite. The reaction to Bessent of late is the closest you’ll get to histrionics unless you’re watching Mad Money with Jim Cramer or Joe Kernen on Squawk Box. (Yes, I’m excluding the Fox panels.) Treasury secretaries don’t speak this way because the markets aren’t MAGA. The markets are global and they already think we’re idiots. More on that later.

Then there was his whole tough-guy sanctions routine against Iran. In the past, major economic sanctions were announced by the POTUS and then quietly explained through memorandums or testimonies by Treasury. In this case, Bessent took the mic and podium and acted like he was the one directing war efforts in Iran.

I’ve made this case before; we’ve been sanctioning the Iranian regime since Jimmy Carter. They don’t care. I’m not saying they don’t work and they’re not painful. They do and they are. But they won’t break the back of a regime whose leader you just murdered and whose very existence it’s fighting for. And the last fucking thing you do is say “this is going to work” and their regime will definitively collapse because when it doesn’t, we lose all credibility.

So what’s happening in the war theater since President Bessent took over? Well, gas and oil prices are pretty fucking high.

The Iranian regime is obviously fighting back and threatening economic devastation on us! Gas prices are already high, diesel prices are the highest EVER. And there’s no end in sight because when China decides to reload its reserves, they’re going to do business with Iran no matter what the fucking Treasury muppet says. We’re not the big dog on that side of the world.

Then we have the latest boner. Intervening into the bond market by announcing a long-term yield bond repurchase scheme. When he teased this a few weeks ago he said he was going to buy between $2 billion and $4 billion in longer-dated bonds to help ease yields. This is called yield curve control and it’s a mechanism that the Fed has rolled out in the past, not the Treasury. The last time they did it in earnest was after World War II and it proved to be inflationary so they stopped.

But here’s the problem with Haughty Scotty B doing it. The marketable treasury market is more than $30 trillion, making this about one fifty-third of 1% of the total market. Once again, the market didn’t listen.

I don’t have a problem with it. I’ll tell you what I do have a problem with in a second though. Because you know who does have a problem with it? The bond market!

Even E.J. Antoni, the weaselly dickhead from the Heritage Foundation, said on Fox that it was a bad idea though he did his best to defend the administration like a good little puppy. (Remember: E.J. Anton, the guy who was too much of a Nazi enthusiast for even the Trump administration, even though I’m pretty sure he’s just Stephen Miller with a wig.)

Here’s my off-the-cuff advice to the Treasury secretary.

Shut the fuck up. Stop saying words.

You tell the Iranians that you’re going to asphyxiate their economy and win the war, and they bomb our bases, our allies, our ships and then say, “No, no, no, we’re going to murder your economy.”

You say you’re going to intervene in Japan’s market and everyone says, please don’t. You do it, it doesn’t work and then you double down by saying “I’m the house, don’t bet against me”? You already lost the bet, you idiot.

And then you tell the world not to worry about the spike in Treasury rates that threaten to take down the entire economy—that’s how this works, by the way—because you’re going to buy back 0.019% of long-dated bonds.

You are an unserious man.

Here’s how this works in case he needs a refresher.

There are three essential elements to bond prices. You’ve got the floor rate, inflation and risk.

The floor is the federal funds rate set by the Fed—rare if ever that a bond will go below this because that’s the cost of institutional capital. Right now it’s around 3.63%. Then there’s inflation. With any investment, the goal is to get back more than inflation. This is a wildcard lately because 2% is the goal, but it’s been 3.7% for the past year. Then there’s the part that Bessent and Trump are responsible for: risk. In other words, how stupid is your administration and how much of a premium should I ask for to buy their debt?

This is where he’s failing his most important constituency. The American people. The Treasury secretary is supposed to project confidence. Supposed to work in the background to calm markets, watch out for fraud and abuse, ensure that the banking system isn’t too highly leveraged and that there isn’t systemic risk building anywhere below the surface. To respond to a crisis in coordination with the Fed. To go after tax cheats as head of the IRS. Dispense payments to agencies and provide strong fiscal guidance to the administration. And if possible, be an ethical presence in the cabinet.

Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary under FDR, was responsible for coordinating war bonds to help us pay for World War II. He was the quiet force advocating on behalf of Jewish people in Europe and here at home during the Holocaust. He helped steer us out of the Great Depression. Was one of the architects of the modern currency system at Bretton Woods that made the dollar the world’s reserve currency—something every future Treasury secretary owes an enormous debt to—and helped establish the World Bank and the IMF. He did it quietly, confidently and behind the scenes.

And who do we have? This idiot is presiding over Trump’s crypto grift by pushing for the Trump family stablecoin to purchase Treasuries while lobbying to prevent the Federal Reserve from doing the same. This would effectively set Trump’s World Liberty Financial up to be a shadow central bank and make Don Jr. and Eric two of the wealthiest people in the world. He presided over massive cuts to the IRS which led to a 35% drop in audit revenue to the agency in 2025 alone. After spending years criticizing Janet Yellen for being shortsighted by loading up on short-term bonds, he quadrupled the size of this program once he got into office.

He has telegraphed multiple market interventions that didn’t work, thereby leaving egg on his face and all our faces as a result. Every time he makes one of these big pronouncements and it doesn’t work it proves the Emperor has no clothes and diminishes our standing in the world. Foreign central banks are liquidating our bonds, according to every fucking Treasury International Capital report since he came into power, so the only things propping up our bond purchases are Japan, the UK, sovereign wealth funds that we can’t see and opaque buyers through the Cayman Islands, a colossal red flag and controversy unearthed by Powell’s Fed that he has yet to even talk about.

And most importantly, he’s carrying water for Russell Vought’s Project 2025. He holds the purse strings. So the blood is on his checkbook.

Scott Bessent will go down in history as the worst Treasury Secretary in the history of the nation. And that includes Donald Regan. Shots fired. Speaking of shots fired, this is the position that Alexander fucking Hamilton invented and occupied and I cannot think of a greater stain on that legacy.

Image Source

• Kirsty O'Connor / Treasury, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.