A Closer Look at Trump's Treasury Secretary Nominee Scott Bessent

Trump also nominated money manager Scott Besant as his treasury secretary. What might Besant be able to get done in this role? He's going to focus on a couple of things more than anything else. The number one thing he's going to focus on is reducing the deficit, reducing the federal debt. There's nothing more important for the treasury secretary to do than reduce the debt that we owe. We just passed the mark of $36 trillion. It's a figure normal people can't even wrap their heads around. To give you an idea of the enormity of it, the single biggest expenditure, if I remember correctly, in the annual budget is the interest on the debt. We're paying more in interest on the debt than we are for defense, for social programs, for anything else. We do know that government spending is indeed linked to inflation. Inflation is a key issue on which Trump may have been elected, a big issue in this past election cycle. It also has a huge impact on the value of the dollar worldwide. If President Trump has made it clear that he intends to preserve the dollar as the standard international currency, but we cannot do that if we're running up huge debts. Nobody will support that. Besant has to preserve the value of the dollar overseas.