Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent came under sharp criticism on Friday, when an analyst on MSNBC's MS NOW accused him of failing to live up to his reputation and of looking like just another "clown car" appointee of President Donald Trump.

Catherine Rampell, a former economics journalist for the New York Times who is now a Washington Post opinion columnist, argued that the unexpected missteps committed by Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh have stunned and outraged Wall Street. The two men hold the most market-watched economic posts in the U.S. government — the Fed chair sets interest rates, while the Treasury secretary manages federal debt issuance and serves as the administration's most prominent voice on financial policy — which is why investors scrutinize their credibility so closely.

"These two guys were supposed to be serious people," she said. "They were people that the markets trusted, and they were chosen because the markets trusted them."

The problem, Rampell argued, is the company the pair keep.

"Look, everybody else in this administration came out of the clown car, right?" she said. "These are people plucked out of Fox News green rooms and Trump's own personal legal team."

Rampell said the two men's past resumes should have guided their decision-making more than they apparently have.

"They both worked for legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller, who I know you've talked about quite a bit recently on your show," she said. "The problem is, Bessent in particular, has not been acting like a serious person. I think he kind of shot his credibility almost immediately in some of the actions that he took early on when he got confirmed, when he basically invited those goons in to have unprecedented access to the Treasury payment system."

Bessent spent decades in macro investing, working at Soros Fund Management and for Druckenmiller before founding his own hedge fund, Key Square Group, and was confirmed as Treasury Secretary in January 2025 by a bipartisan 68-29 Senate vote. Warsh served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 to 2011, was a finalist for the Fed chairmanship in 2017, and now chairs the central bank.

Rampell's reference to "goons" with "unprecedented access" recalled the controversy in the opening weeks of Trump's second term, when personnel tied to Elon Musk's cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), gained access to the Treasury payment system, which processes trillions of dollars in federal payments every year. The system, run by the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service, disburses Social Security benefits, tax refunds, Medicare payments, and federal employees' paychecks, and the DOGE access prompted lawsuits from federal employee unions and a group of Democratic state attorneys general, along with federal court orders restricting who could use it.

The exchange was posted on YouTube.

Source: Raw Story