Scott Bessent and Kevin Warsh emerge as top contenders, with Marc Rowan and Bill Hagerty lingering in the background.
President-elect Donald Trump has yet to make his decision for Treasury secretary. Wall Street is still waiting for the official announcement as market watchers speculate who could be chosen for the high-level position.
Scott Bessent, a billionaire financier, and Kevin Warsh, a former Federal Reserve Board member, are the heavy favorites to lead the Treasury Department.
In recent days, two more names have been added to the conversation: Apollo Wealth Management CEO Marc Rowan and Sen. Bill Haggerty (R-Tenn.).
Scott Bessent
Bessent, the founder of global macro investment company Key Square Group and Trump’s key economic adviser, has garnered the support of several prominent individuals.
Kyle Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management, believes Bessent is the right person for the job because he has invested across the globe for decades and already maintains relationships with global finance ministers and central bankers.
“He has a masterful knowledge of the architecture of the global financial system and its players,” Bass told The Epoch Times.
“To be an effective Treasury Secretary, you have to deeply understand the U.S. bond market, trade, tariffs, the political process, how to properly sanction America’s enemies, and the U.S. budget. Bessent has the gravitas one needs to operate on day one.”
The president-elect has concentrated his economic agenda on tariffs, something that Bessent supports.
Trump has proposed a 10 to 20 percent universal tariff and levies between 60 and 100 percent on Chinese imports.
Despite his advocacy of tariffs as a trade policy negotiating tool, Bessent has recommended a more conservative approach.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in October, the Wall Street veteran said the economic measure can be “layered in gradually” to ensure higher prices appear over time and will be offset by disinflationary policies.
Additionally, speaking to the Financial Times, Bessent stated that Trump’s “maximalist” positions on trade can be watered down.
“My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent said. “It’s escalate to de-escalate.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, however, preferred Howard Lutnick, who was selected to helm the Department of Commerce.
“Would be interesting to hear more people weigh in on this for @realDonaldTrump to consider feedback. My view [for-what-it’s-worth] is that Bessent is a business-as-usual choice,” Musk wrote on Nov. 16 on social media platform X.
Kevin Warsh
Kevin Warsh, 54, recently entered the conversation as a potential nominee for Treasury secretary.
Warsh is a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He was an economic adviser to President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2006 and is presently working on Trump’s transition team, shaping economic policy and staffing. Since resigning from the Fed, Warsh has been a member of the board of directors at UPS. He is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
While Warsh is a favorite on the betting website Polymarket, he has garnered mixed perceptions from market experts.
Economist Mohamed El-Erian said he would bring two things to the table: solid proficiency in economics and better economic communication.
“He understands the functioning of the capital markets,” El-Erian, the chief economic adviser at Allianz, told Bloomberg TV. “It’s not often that you find someone who can operate at this intersection of economics, finance, and policy, and it’s not often that you find someone who not only can operate there but can communicate well.”
Bass says that Warsh “will be more ‘business as usual.’”
Even if Trump were to select Warsh for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Bass said he would not “have confidence that Warsh … has what it takes to be Fed president.”
While serving on the Federal Reserve Board as a governor from 2006 to 2011, Warsh helped craft the central bank’s response to the global financial crisis.
He was a staunch critic of then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke’s endeavors, expressing skepticism that the central bank could stimulate the economy and bolster the labor market by lowering long-term interest rates. Instead, he urged his colleagues to pull back on their monetary policy easing in September 2009.
After Trump’s 2016 election victory, Warsh was considered a frontrunner to helm the Federal Reserve. Jerome Powell was eventually chosen as the central bank chief.
Speaking in an interview with CNBC last month, Warsh stated that the Fed does not have a “serious theory of inflation,” alluding to various measurements to determine if it has achieved its mandate of price stability.
“The central bank needs to be very clear about its reaction function, be clear about its goals, and not look like it’s lurching. That’s what put us in the mess we have,” Warsh told the business news network.
Warsh, writing in a July op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, blamed the “concomitant central-bank asset purchases” in 2021 and 2022 for the inflation surge.
In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, the Fed purchased trillions of dollars in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds to cushion the economic blows of the public health crisis.
The central bank’s balance sheet reached nearly $9 trillion. Since March 2022, when the Fed launched its tightening cycle, the balance sheet has fallen to about $7 trillion.
Warsh also raised inflation concerns, stating that the Fed will rekindle the inflation flame if it does not continue reducing its balance sheet, which is equal to about 25 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
“Price stability would be more easily achieved if the Fed continues to shrink its holdings,” Warsh said.
He is still seen succeeding Powell when his term expires in 2026.
Marc Rowan
Marc Rowan, 62, is a billionaire investor who became one of the newer contenders.
He co-founded private equity titan Apollo Global Management in the 1990s, an investment giant with approximately $700 billion in assets under management. Rowan presently serves as the CEO.
In the past, Rowan has stated that he would be open to serving as head of the Federal Reserve or secretary of the Treasury if asked.
When he appeared at the Economic Club of Washington in February, Rowan stopped short of declaring whether he was a Republican or Democrat.
“I don’t even know what the labels mean anymore. We are in a very confusing time, politically, but at the same time, when the dust settles from this election, something tells me we will need as a country to turn our attention to the fiscal disorder of our house,” he said.
Rowan has expressed optimism surrounding the president-elect’s team and its proposal to fundamentally overhaul the government.
“I think Elon Musk represents wholesale change, and I think we actually need wholesale change,” he said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest conference last week.
Musk has been tapped by Trump to lead the proposed new Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, one of the Trump team’s leading projects. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors believes DOGE could eliminate about $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget.
“Our financial situation is fixable,” Rowan said. “It is fixable in a way that is positive for the base that the president-elect has said that he wants to help. But it is not fixable by small amounts of tinkering. It is about wholesale change.”
The U.S. government’s annual budget is about $7 trillion.
Rowan has also criticized the Federal Reserve’s recent unwinding of restrictive monetary policy.
“To the extent we accelerate the economy and have to go in the other direction, that would not be a good day,” Rowan told Bloomberg Television.
Bill Hagerty
Hagerty, 65, recently entered the Treasury secretary conversation.
A former private equity investor, he recently accompanied the president-elect to the Nov. 19 SpaceX launch in Texas.
He served as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development from 2011 to 2014. He was also the ambassador to Japan in Trump’s first term.
In an exchange with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at a February Senate Banking Committee hearing, Hagerty suggested that the current administration was manipulating interest rates ahead of the presidential election by selling short-term debt securities to prevent an increase in long-term yields.
As of Nov. 22, according to the betting website Polymarket, Warsh is the top candidate, holding a 38 percent chance of being nominated. Bessent is at a close second at 35 percent. Rowan and Hagerty are positioned at a distant 16 percent and 8 percent, respectively.