Bessent, a native of South Carolina, graduated from Yale University and started his career at the Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the oldest investment firms in the US.
He made his name in the 1990s betting against the British pound and Japanese yen while working for Soros, a major Democratic donor.
In 2015, he started his own fund, Key Square Capital Management, which is known for making investments based on big-picture economic policy.
He has also taught economic history at Yale, has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Institute.
He and his husband, a former New York City prosecutor, married in 2011 and have two children. He is known for philanthropy in South Carolina, where his family has deep roots.
Bessent has defended tariffs – a capstone of Trump’s protectionist agenda – arguing that opposition to them is rooted in political ideology and not “considered economic thought”.
But he has also characterised Trump’s support for such border taxes as a negotiating tool, suggesting the president-elect isn’t necessarily committed to aggressively raising duties.
That stance makes him more moderate than others whose names were floated for the treasury role, such as former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
However, Bessent has been a strong proponent of Trump’s embrace of the crypto industry. Such support would make him the first treasury secretary to openly champion cryptocurrency, sending a clear signal that Trump is serious about establishing the US as the “crypto capital of the planet”.
In an interview with Fox News over the summer, Bessent said he thought cryptocurrencies fitted well with the ethos of the Republican Party, and Democrats had overreacted to fraudsters such as Sam Bankman-Fried.
“Crypto is about freedom,” he said.
