Bessent’s Past Failures Resurface as Trump’s Economic Strategy Falters

0:00Ben Meiselas:As Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is now saying the U.S. is imposing economic D-Day on Iran and it will be crushing, Besant's past filled with failure after failure is surfacing. Not a lot of people talk about Treasury Secretary Scott Besson's past. And even though we see him now as this bumbling fool who lies day in and day out, he kind of got a pass and people assume that this guy knew what he was doing, but he didn't. And all of the funds that he ran in the past, it seems, they failed one by one. I mean, you're talking about like a 90 % reduction in the value of one of his funds. That really should have been a layup for him.

0:52Ben Meiselas:So he couldn't run his own$5 billion fund. There were so many withdrawals and redemptions that it was basically reduced to$500 million. And this is the guy who is the Treasury Secretary. Now, he published an op-ed in the Financial Times last night on Sunday night, and it was one of the most bizarre reads ever. And this is how he announced, economic D-Day, doomsday, we're going to crush Iran with this. And as you read it, it had some incoherent references to Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher from the 17th century. And he was talking about the Pascal wager, and it really made like zero sense what he was writing.

1:45Ben Meiselas:And he may be nervous, he may be just all over the place, but it was really quite a bizarre thing to read. I want to share that with you, and then I want to talk about his past. I'll show you an interview, for example, that he gave in 2023 where he was like, and let me tell you what I would do right now. I would so much rather take the economies of Japan and India over China. He goes, I was at a dinner party recently, and I said, you can take China. I'm not constructive on the growth of China. And I will take the Japan and India economies. Well, that's interesting because right now in 2026, you tried to bail out the yen by swapping euros to manipulate the market and that failed.

2:36Ben Meiselas:You just did a bond buyback scheme and that failed as well. And now we see you are begging China that China needs to go along with your economic D-Day against Iran because China is allied with Iran. And China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, by the way, who no doubt studied the types of stuff that Treasury Secretary Besant did and said in the past. Wang Yi and the foreign ministry spokesperson over in China said, yeah, no, we're not going to go along with what you're saying, Besant. We are allied with Iran and we stand behind our allies. So let's do this together. Let's take this piece by piece. This is a comprehensive video, but knowledge is power, and we need to learn about Besson's failure of a past.

3:31Ben Meiselas:But first, let me share with you this op-ed that he published in the Financial Times so you can see his behavior in the past 24 hours. Then we'll go back to his behavior over the past 24 years, and I'll point out that this guy's a loser. This guy's a failure. And like so many in MAGA, his MAGA arc is being a failure, which he calls being a contrarian. So here's what he posted last night. President Trump has dismantled Iran's military capabilities, destroyed nearly 100 % of its military factories, and buried its nuclear program. Pause there. Remember, was it back in April or early May or so that Besant said, let me tell you what's going to happen with Iran.

4:22Ben Meiselas:Their pipes are getting so filled up with crude, they're going to burst and Iran is going to literally implode if we just do nothing. Yeah, he and Donald Trump lied about that. Then Besant says in his message last night, we're now entering the end game. At dawn begins an economic D-Day, the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary. The Islamic Republic has subsisted by dressing extortion as security guarantees. It has drawn strength from a calculus that regards Iranian retaliation as certain and American enforcement as negotiable. Under President Trump, that era is over.

5:09Ben Meiselas:And those who fear the danger of defying Tehran ought not to discount the cost of testing Washington. Pause. What do you mean the cost of testing Washington? Donald Trump and Netanyahu engaged in a catastrophic and unlawful war against Iran. You threw 30 ,000 munitions at Iran, like in a 48 period, which made the shock and awe campaign against Iraq look small. And Iran was able to repel the Trump Netanyahu invasion, inflict pain on its Arab nation neighbors. And then Donald Trump and you would claim fake deals with Iran and the Ayatollah. and then you would say, we did a deal. We didn't do a deal.

5:56Ben Meiselas:We did a deal. We don't do a deal. And so, and by the way, if you were able just to crush them with this end game economic sanctions, then why wouldn't you have just done that at the first place? So part of the plan was engaging in an unlawful war, slaughtering little girls in Manab and Le Maire, engaging in all of these war crimes, running out of our munitions, destroying the lives of our service members. Treating our service members at our military bases abroad and on aircraft carriers like crap, that was all part of the end game plan there, Besant. Besant goes on to say, the president has created the conditions to leverage every agency, every authority in action many assumed we would never summon.

6:43Ben Meiselas:Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains the tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone. Okay, well, the main economic lifeline is China, and the alliance is Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Iran is also allied with a lot of the BRICS bloc nations. You had Foreign Minister Aragchi greeted recently as a hero at the last BRICS block summit while Donald Trump was attacking NATO and attacking the G7. And so let's talk about that. Are you going to be attacking China? You've already said, no, you're not going to do that. What about Russia? Donald Trump's buddy Putin. No, you're not going to do that.

7:36Ben Meiselas:So these are just words, empty words. Besant published that and more in the Financial Times. Scott Besant, an economic D-Day is coming for Iran. Countries that calculate appeasement of the regime to be a safer choice should reconsider. This is where he talks about Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher. He goes, in the 17th century, French philosopher Blaise Pascal gave enduring expression to the dilemma beneath this temptation. He understood that uncertainty does not absolve men or nations of divine judgment. In fact, it demands a more exacting appraisal of risk and imposes a higher price of error.

8:25Ben Meiselas:Pascal's eponymous wager now applies to Iran's lifelines. Nations that, in courting reprieve from Tehran, continue to replenish the very regime from which they seek protection and now exceed the limits of America's tolerance. Those who sever Iran's remaining financial and commercial connectivity will reinvigorate their own. They will deepen their access to global capital, reinforce confidence in their markets, and detain the standing they seek in the world economy. Why? They're going to say, United States has our back. The United States just declared a trade war against Canada, which was its closest allies before, which you and Lutnick and Jameson Greer and Donald Trump are involved in, that no American wants.

9:14Ben Meiselas:You impose 50 % tariffs against Canada. And Canada struck back and said, okay, we'll go dollar to dollar for you. So I think the world's looking at stuff like that and go, yeah, I don't think we really want the United States blessing at this point. And then Besant goes, the alternative for those who tether themselves to Tehran is the foreclosure of any path to lasting prosperity. Illicit finance will flourish as it so often does, where confidence has collapsed. And any nation that serves as a financial artery of a withering regime should expect to share in its isolation. To become a sanctuary for terror is to become in the eyes of the United States, a global pariah.

10:00Ben Meiselas:Oh, Besant, Wang Yi and Xi Jinping are shaking in their boots right now. You're going to isolate China right now. China's never been stronger. What the hell are you even talking about? Y 'all couldn't even impose significant sanctions against Russia. Donald Trump withdrew those. Nobody is afraid of you. When you try to decouple from China in 2025, they just cut off the rare earths and immediately Donald Trump came running and crying uncle to Xi Jinping. And then Trump brags that now China's agreed to buy 13 million metric tons of soybeans. Yeah, they were buying 26 million metric tons under former President Biden.

10:46Ben Meiselas:and they ain't even buying the 13 million metric tons now. Go and ask our soybean farmers. And then you have Besson saying, any remaining tie to Tehran will hasten the economic ostracism of countries and entities, whether that tie be purposefully constructed or willfully ignored. So that's the message from Besson. By the way, Pascal's wager, did you even understand a word of what he's saying? I understand Pascal's wager from European history, the claim that given the stakes, it is more rational to bet on God's existence than to bet against it. A pragmatic and prudential argument that basically says, what's the downside of having infinite faith when you could achieve infinite eternal salvation?

11:39Ben Meiselas:Thus, doesn't it make sense to bet on God versus the contrary? But what does that have to do with anything that we're even talking about? What does the Pascal's wager even mean in this context? And of all of the things that you could be talking about during this doomsday message that you're delivering, Pascal's freaking wager? You're just showing that you're a damn weirdo, dude. Like, what the hell are you even talking about? And he is a weirdo and he is a failure. So now let's peel back the layers of his failed past. And I think Gordon Johnson did a good job describing it as such. Every market has a fellow who is certain the prices are wrong and that he alone knows the right ones.

12:25Ben Meiselas:Usually the market charges him tuition for this belief. Occasionally it hands him the treasury. Consider the record. In 2000, Scott Besant left the Soros Fund to run a$1 billion fund of his own. Five years later, the fund no longer existed. In 2015, he tried again with Keysquare. His fund co-founded with a Soros alum, Michael Germino, one of like the top traders out there, and seeded with$2 billion of Soros money, which is a bit like failing your driving test and being handed a Ferrari. Assets peaked at$5.1 billion in 2017 and finished 2023 at$577 million. Institutional investors reportedly went from 180 to 20, a retention rate that would embarrass a gym in February.

13:23Ben Meiselas:And in 2018, Soros, the man who staked him, took his chips off the table. When your own anchor investor would rather not watch, that is not typically a buy signal. Which brings us to the question, is the man now confidently dictating where oil, the dollar, treasury yields, and stocks ought to trade a macro mastermind the market tragically failed to appreciate in the past? Or did the market spend two decades doing its due diligence on him and sell, showing he was a complete and utter failure? He believes he's smarter than the market. The market already graded that exam twice. And we see his manipulation right now, right?

14:09Ben Meiselas:Where he did the euro swap for yen without even letting the European central bankers know. It manipulated the market and led the yen to rise for a brief period of time relative to the dollar. And now the yen is crashing again, and the Japanese are going to have to sell U.S. Treasury bronze to try to prop up and bail out its failing yen. You had the bond buyback scheme by Treasury Secretary Besant where he tried to buy long-term bonds, take them off the market, sell a lot more short-term bonds, which is basically a Ponzi scheme, and kick the problem down the road, but try to decrease the longer treasury yields by taking older bonds that haven't matured off the market and selling shorter-term bonds to make the money in order to make the money.

15:04Ben Meiselas:buy those longer bonds. For about a 24-hour period, it resulted in the Treasury yields decreasing, but then they rose with a vengeance and they rose even higher than they were before. You know, it's notable that Treasury Secretary Besant wrote his op-ed declaring economic doomsday in the Financial Times. Interesting choice because 24 hours before, the Financial Times ran the following headline, bossing the bond market around never works. Despite Scott Besant's efforts, investors worry something is up. Besant's bond market battle is starting to look like his boss's war in Iran. A tangled set of objectives, underestimating your opponent, and an implausible path to victory.

15:51Ben Meiselas:And like the conflict in the Middle East, we are all going to

15:59Ben Meiselas:look at his past of his failure, it is prelude as well. This was not some macroeconomic genius. It is a guy with an inflated ego, an inflated sense of his self who failed consistently. And so how'd he get pushed into the MAGA orbit? Well, when he had this reduced fund from the 5.1 billion it was originally at Key Square to 500 million. He was the contrarian. He would always kind of bet against the market. And so leading up to the election, he would bet against the market and the bad market that Donald Trump left former President Biden. At the end of the Biden administration, things were getting better.

16:47Ben Meiselas:Inflation was going down. But there was a year or two where Besant started to have some returns as betting against the market, as shorting the market when you had all of this kind of right-wing oligarch money really funneling to, I think, really go after Biden. And we saw a lot of that there. So Besant kind of inured himself or became closer to Donald Trump during that period of time. I think this also sums it up interestingly as well of somebody who's had a relationship as well with Besant or knew Besant. Okay, fine, let's do this. I knew Besant when he worked in the London office at Soros and heard pitches for each one of his subsequent ventures listed below and for his last venture, a fund to fund with Jeff Tarrant, not included below.

17:42Ben Meiselas:In short summary, he claimed the valor for the famed British pound cross trade, and it's a myth. He didn't actually do any of it. Talks about how Soros managed his own principal position and risk always. There were other investing teams that also traded currency crosses, including the one Besant was a part of in London. But to be clear, it was a semi-autonomous group with its own capital and risk budgets allocated by Soros internally. They had nothing, nothing to do with the massive bet by George against the Bank of England's intervention. Like many who stayed in the business, Besson's team at Soros broke off to do their own fund with a capital allocation.

18:24Ben Meiselas:They bled to death being short oil and long U.S. equity volatility in 2003, 2004, which introduces my point about Besant, which has always held up through the years. Besant is a contrarian. Being a contrarian caused his group to bleed out in early 2000s, his first fund to fail in the mid-2000s, his second fund to fail in mid to late 2010s. At one point, he took the other side of the yen carry trade in 2017 and so on. The problem with the contrarian dogma is, I'm not wrong, I'm just early, which leads to hubris. Markets still wrong, have to stay with it until the lights dim and losses compound to the point where the business is no longer viable.

19:12Ben Meiselas:Besant did that death spiral three times before becoming a marketing guy at a fund of fund. and that's where he didn't have success, but he was just a marketing guy at a fund to fund at the end. That was the end of his MAGA, that was part of his MAGA arc, a marketing guy, a fund to fund. Like Trump slaps his name on a building and says, ah, that's my building. That's basically what Besant was doing in oversimplified version. For a career trader, that's like going from starting for the New York Yankees to being the Kenny Powers TV series character, trying to make it happen on a low-rung minor league team in Myrtle Beach.

19:52Ben Meiselas:It's glib to criticize his experience. That's not the real issue now. The real issue is Besant is a serial contrarian, and that is the worst bad thing if you were a financial speculator in the markets. And so I think that's interesting insight into Besant. And then we have this video of Besant from 2023, where Besant says, I would so much rather have the Japan and India economy than China. And he said that he believed the China economy would suffer and that Japan and India would be rising. Well, interestingly, the Trump regime did attack India, did attack China and did attack Japan. They attacked all of them.

20:33So here's what he said back then.

20:37Ben Meiselas:Play this clip. The early 22, people still very constructive on china and i had had a long-term secular down view based both on um you know economics gravity because somehow everyone thought well china's so big they have this closed capital account you know if it were any other country it already would have exploded but you know the view that gravity would win and then i also had the view that when party chairman and Xi came in, he's a different kind of cat. And, you know, this very unusual capitalist, communist blend that had taken China out of the dark ages and into the modern world was over.

21:28So now we've seen they've gone to more command and control economy. But so at this dinner, I told everyone at the table, I said, you can have China. I will take India and Japan. then let's reconvene in five years.

21:42Ben Meiselas:Then I found this line notable from his interview at the Money Maze podcast from 2023 that I just showed you. He said, when you're on war footing, what do you need most? You need energy, you need food, and here's, let me just play the clip for you because he seems to be describing the desperation that, oh, and you unload some of your bonds, and he seems to be describing the desperation that the United States is in right now. Here, play this clip. So if you were going to go on war footing, you would need energy, you'd need food, and then you would probably sell your treasuries. Well, there you have it, everybody.

22:21Ben Meiselas:I wanted to give you that background and broader perspective on Treasury Secretary Besant so you can understand a little bit more about him. I'd love to know your thoughts. But yeah, when he was on his own, he did not have successful funds. And now he's the treasury secretary. Well, hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. And thanks for watching, everybody. We appreciate it. Get your copy of WTF America. Thanks, everybody.

23:09so