Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is bumbling toward wrecking the U.S. economy, Timothy Noah wrote in a blistering analysis for The New Republic published on Tuesday — and one simple economic trend proves it.
The breaking point, he argued, was Bessent's bizarre speech at the World Economic Forum, where he pushed, among other things, nonsensical claims about housing and defended President Donald Trump's now-deescalating threats to invade Greenland by saying all the countries criticizing the administration are showing "hysteria."
"Bessent previously enjoyed a reputation as the sole grown-up in Trump’s Cabinet," wrote Noah. "But at Davos last week, Bessent engaged in a frantic sort of MAGA minstrelsy, or possibly he converted under duress into a true-believing thug. I’m not sure it matters. But the more Bessent shoots his trash-talking mouth off, the more the dollar’s value falls and the higher the price of gold rises. Probably the best thing Bessent could do right now — for himself, for the dollar, and for your 401(k) — is to shut the f--- up."
One figure proves how badly Bessent's behavior is going over with investors, Noah argued: the now-skyrocketing price of gold.
"As I explained in October ('Gold Is Booming and That’s Really Bad News'), it means people expect higher inflation and are losing faith in the stock market along with the overall health of the economy. In such moments, Wall Street longs for a steady hand at the helm," wrote Noah.
And right now, that number is alarming.
"An ounce of gold rose in price Monday morning to $5,100 per ounce, up from $4,000 per ounce three months earlier," wrote Noah. "For comparison’s sake, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, an ounce was priced at $20.67, or about $850 after inflation. That was enough to hurry California into statehood two years later and to triple its population by 1860. Today, an ounce of gold sells for six times that amount, and amateur California prospectors are panning once again for gold. But a much easier path is to invest in gold while the Trump administration trashes the rules-based international order."
Ultimately, Noah concluded, economists might want to come up with a new recession metric called "the Bessent," where the Treasury Secretary's number of hostile and combative remarks is a measure of how high economic risk currently is. "The more Bessent makes himself sound like Kristi Noem or Kash Patel, the less confident I will feel about my stock holdings and my job security. Mr. Treasury Secretary, I beg you: Put a sock in it."
