No. Scott Bessent is not an “adult in the room”. Shame on all who are calling him such…
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Dan Drezner is correct. There is no honest, honorable, competent, or intelligent way that Scott Bessent can in any sense be characterized as an “adult in the room”:
Dan Drezner: The Silliest, Brattiest Adult in the Room: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room>: ‘Portraying Scott Bessent as an adult is a category error. Bessent has done little while in office that resembles adult behavior. His comparative advantage in this administration is that he looks like a preppie banker and is about ten percent less crazy than all of Trump’s other policy principals…. The media should stop attempting to turn him into something he is decidedly not…
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Drezner focuses his particulars on Bessent’s latest foreign-affairs security-policy temper tantrum:
Dan Drezner: The Silliest, Brattiest Adult in the Room: <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room>: ‘
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comBessent on why US troops won't get involved in defending Europe: "As I told my European counterparts about two weeks ago, 'All I hear from you is that Putin wants to march into Warsaw. The one thing I'm sure of is that Putin isn't marching into Boston.'"
Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:52:05 GMT
View on BlueskySo there is a lot…. Some didacticism is necessary to elaborate the ways in which Scott Bessent is not an adult in the room:
Bessent chose an interesting time to say this… [for] Trump himself now sounds more hawkish towards Russia….
The whole point of an alliance is to use the collective defense of all the treaty members to deter…. Russia is not acting like a country deterred…. So maybe someone should tell Bessent that his own weasel words are inviting additional Russian aggression.
Finally… perhaps one of Bessent’s aides can Google about the one time NATO invoked Article V in its entire history. I’ll give Bessent a hint: it did not involve an attack on European soil….
The media thirst for an adult… makes great copy, suggests that there is palace intrigue, possible reassures anxious readers, and maybe greases a source…. [But] Bessent… [merely] looks like a preppie banker and is about ten percent less crazy than all of Trump’s other policy principals…
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Just one more example:
Paul Krugman: Scott Bessent, Sleazy Smearer <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scott-bessent-sleazy-smearer>: ‘[After 2009] the Fed could have thrown up its hands and simply accepted the prospect of years of mass unemployment. Instead, however, it tried to do its job by expanding its toolbox, buying assets whose interest rates weren’t zero. Critics, overwhelmingly from the political right, harshly criticized the Fed. A widely circulated open letter to Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair, warned that asset purchases “risk currency debasement and inflation.” Among those signing the letter was Kevin Hassett, now Trump’s chief economist and possibly the next Fed chair. But the inflation never came…. Inflation ran consistently below the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent until the post-Covid inflation spike, almost a dozen years after quantitative easing began. So how does Bessent deal with the fact that the critics of quantitative easing were proved completely, decisively wrong? By pretending that the evils they wrongly predicted actually came to pass. Younger and less affluent households, he writes, were “hit hardest by inflation.” What inflation?…
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Indeed, it is true. Here is the key passage from Bessent:
Scott Bessent: The Fed’s ‘Gain of Function’ Monetary Policy <https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-feds-gain-of-function-monetary-policy-ac0dc38a>: ‘Successive [Federal Reserve]. interventions during and after the financial crisis of 2008…. Large firms thrived by locking in cheap debt, while smaller firms reliant on floating-rate loans were squeezed as rates rose. Homeowners saw their property values soar, largely insulated by fixed-rate mortgages. Meanwhile, younger and less affluent households, shut out of ownership and hit hardest by inflation, missed out on appreciation. By failing to deliver on its inflation mandate, the Fed allowed class and generational disparities to widen…
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But inflation never got above under Bernanke and Yellen, before Trump put his guy—Jay Powell—in as Fed Chair. Younger and less affluent households could not have been hit by 2008-2018 inflation that did not exist, but that Bessent claims did.
And so his lies go.
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There are other lies in this paragraph as well:
The fact that current homeowners have fixed-rate mortgages does not mean that if interest rates go up. then housing prices rise. Bessent lies.
And interest rates did not go up. They remained well below their pre-2008 levels until Jay Powell adopted the inflation-control policy that has Trump so angry with him right now. Bessent lies when he says they did.
A monetary policy over 2008-2018 with more quantitative easing would have produced higher interest rates—Bessent says that it was QE that pushed up interest rates before Trump’s guy got in. And so he lies.
And a monetary policy over 2008-2018 without QE would have produced substantially higher unemployment, and hence greater class and intergemeratopa disparities from that higher unemployment. Again Bessent lies.
That is four. That should be enough.
The Bessent Affinity has told a lot of lies to me about who and what he is over the past year and a half. Just saying.
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Bessent, Scott. 2025. “The Fed’s ‘Gain of Function’ Monetary Policy”. Wall Street Journal, September 5. <https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-feds-gain-of-function-monetary-policy-ac0dc38a>
Drezner, Dan. 2025. “The Silliest, Brattiest Adult in the Room”. Drezner’s World, September 25. <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-worst-adult-in-the-room>.
FRED. 2025. “Personal Consumption Expenditures: Chain-type Price Index”. Updated: Aug 29, 2025 7:43 AM CDT. <https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI>.
FRED. 2025. “Market Yield on U.S. Treasury Securities at 10-Year Constant Maturity, Quoted on an Investment Basis”. Updated: Sep 24, 2025 3:17 PM CDT. <https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10#>.
Krugman, Paul. 2025. “Scott Bessent, Sleazy Smearer“. Paul Krugman, September 8. <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/scott-bessent-sleazy-smearer>.
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