Scott Bessent

Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent was born on August 21, 1962, in Conway, South Carolina.⁠[1]

His father, Homer Gaston Bessent Jr., was a real estate developer; his mother is Barbara McLeod Bessent.⁠[2]

In his 2025 confirmation testimony he said he was born and raised in the South Carolina Low Country and that his father fell into severe financial difficulty when he was young.⁠[3]

Bessent majored in political science at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry and graduated in 1984. As an undergraduate he belonged to Branford College and was president of the Wolf’s Head Society.⁠[4]

In 1991 he joined George SorosGeorge SorosGeorge Soros is an American investor and philanthropist, the founder of the hedge fund Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Foundations. He is known for macro trading and for shorting the British pound in 1992, is also a major political donor on the side of the U.S. Democratic Party, and has long been at the center of political controversy and conspiracy theories.Open the full entry’s Soros Fund Management and from 1991 to 2000 served as managing partner of the firm’s London office.⁠[5]

In 1992 he worked with George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller on the firm’s bet against the British pound, a trade that earned the firm more than $1 billion.⁠[6]

He founded and ran the hedge fund Bessent Capital from 2000 to 2005 and worked at the New York firm Protege Partners from 2007 to 2010.⁠[2]

From 2011 to 2015 he was chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management.⁠[2]

In 2011 he married John Freeman, a former New York City prosecutor; they have two children, Cole and Caroline.⁠[2]

In August 2015 he announced that he would leave Soros at the end of the year to start his own firm, Key Square Group, with a $2 billion investment commitment from Soros.⁠[7]

He supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, and in the 2024 cycle he was one of the campaign’s top economic advisers as well as a leading fundraiser.⁠[6]

On November 22, 2024, President-elect Trump announced Bessent as his choice for Treasury secretary; Kevin WarshKevin WarshKevin Warsh (Kevin M. Warsh) is an American economic policy official who has served as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee since May 22, 2026. Early in his career he worked in mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley; from 2002 to 2006 he was executive secretary of the White House National Economic Council, and from 2006 to 2011 he was a Federal Reserve governor through the 2008 financial crisis. After leaving the Board he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and wrote an independent review of monetary policy transparency for the Bank of England.Open the full entry, Marc Rowan and Bill Hagerty had also been considered for the post.⁠[8]

Ethics filings released in January 2025 showed he would resign from Key Square upon confirmation and end his involvement within 90 days; Key Square Group was set to be wound down by the end of March.⁠[9]

In testimony to the Senate Finance Committee he argued for making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent and said “we must ensure that the U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency.”⁠[3]

On January 27, 2025, the Senate confirmed him as Treasury secretary by a vote of 68 to 29.⁠[10]

The next day Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh swore him in as the 79th Secretary of the Treasury.⁠[11]

He and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer led the U.S. side in trade talks with China in Geneva. The joint statement that followed suspended 24 percentage points of the additional U.S. tariffs for an initial 90 days, retaining 10 percent.⁠[12]

In August 2025, after Trump removed Billy Long as IRS commissioner, a White House official said Bessent would serve as acting commissioner of the IRS.⁠[13]

On March 13, 2026, the IRS announced that his service as acting commissioner under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act had expired, with IRS chief executive Frank Bisignano running day-to-day operations.⁠[14]

On August 11, 2025, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics told the Senate Finance Committee that he had not complied on time with certain terms of his ethics agreement, which had deadlines of April 28 and May 5, 2025; the letter did not identify the assets.⁠[15]

That December he said on CBSCBSCBS is an American commercial broadcast television network. It was founded in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters, renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, and grew from a radio network into a television network under William S. Paley. With ABC and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it has been owned in turn by Westinghouse, Viacom, ViacomCBS and Paramount Global, has been owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation since 2025, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry that he had sold his soybean farm interests under the ethics agreement: “I actually just divested it this week as part of my ethics agreement.”⁠[16]

In September 2025 reports said that in 2007 he had declared homes in both Bedford Hills, New York, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, as principal residences on Bank of America mortgages; experts quoted saw no sign of wrongdoing, and no charges or findings were reported.⁠[17]

On October 9, 2025, the Treasury bought Argentine pesos and finalized a $20 billion currency swap framework with Argentina’s central bank; Bessent said the Treasury “is prepared, immediately, to take whatever exceptional measures are warranted” to stabilize markets.⁠[18]

Reports in September 2025 described a confrontation between Bessent and Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte. At a Senate Finance hearing in June 2026 he denied threatening to punch Pulte, acknowledged saying he would “kick his a**,” and said the two had moved past it.⁠[19]

On October 2, 2026, the Treasury sanctioned a Hamas financing network, including a member of its military wing, two France-based fundraisers and two entities, which it said had moved more than $2 million through sham charities and crypto assets.⁠[20]

On October 5 the Office of Foreign Assets Control removed 125 persons from sanctions lists in the third round of a sanctions modernization initiative he launched in May 2026.⁠[21]

On October 7 the Treasury announced the first civil penalty under the Outbound Investment Security Program, fining Amidi, LLC $200,000 for an unreported investment in a Chinese artificial intelligence company.⁠[22]

On October 13 the Treasury sanctioned four individuals and 11 entities linked to the horse-racing enterprise of Cartel del Noreste.⁠[23]

On October 14 the Treasury and the IRS issued proposed regulations, not yet final, that would limit Premium Tax Credit eligibility from 2027 to citizens, nationals and certain lawfully present noncitizens.⁠[24]

On October 21, under “Operation Economic Outcast,” the Treasury sanctioned a Panama- and Greece-based law firm and shipping companies tied to Iran’s shadow fleet.⁠[25]

On October 22 the Treasury proposed regulations implementing Section 1001 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which would generally bar large institutional investors from buying single-family homes from January 7, 2027, with exceptions; the rule was open for comment.⁠[26]

On October 7, 2026, Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, wrote to Bessent about Treasury yields reaching their highest levels in more than two decades and about the Treasury’s bond buybacks, asking for answers by October 21.⁠[27]

On October 9, 2026, he appointed economist Judy Shelton as a senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary, advising on currency policy with a focus on China.⁠[28]

The same day it was reported that he would skip the IMFInternational Monetary FundThe International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international financial institution conceived at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, whose Articles entered into force in 1945 and which began operations on March 1, 1947; headquartered in Washington, it has 191 member countries and has been led by Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva since October 2019.Open the full entry and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok on October 12–18 because of domestic engagements, with Deputy Secretary Francis Brooke and Under Secretary Erin Browne leading the U.S. delegation.⁠[29]

In a written statement to IMF and World Bank ministerial committees, he urged both to return to core missions, phase out lending to countries meeting graduation criteria and back energy access: “Energy abundance sparks economic abundance.”⁠[30]

On October 22, 2026, he met Paraguayan President Santiago Peña to discuss the bilateral economic partnership and welcomed Paraguay’s commitment to secure and resilient critical-mineral supply chains.⁠[31]

His Treasury biography says he has been a Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller UniversityThe Rockefeller University is a biomedical research university on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in New York City, devoted mainly to scientific research and graduate education; it grew out of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research founded by John D. Rockefeller.Open the full entry trustee, supported the Harlem Children’s Zone, established the McLeod Rehabilitation Center at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Greenville, and that his family endowed three named Yale scholarships.⁠[5]