Scott Bessent The US Treasury secretary; Tim Geithner, Paulson, $29 trillion Dollar crisis, Trump socialdemokratisk SD
Scott Bessent The US Treasury secretary must defend the Trump administration’s unpredictable economic agenda while maintaining investors’ faith in US bonds.
Alexander Hamilton got it right when he said that every US Treasury secretary after him would be plagued by the prospect of weary creditors questioning the strength of American debt.
Investors the world-over prize stability and predictability from the most significant economy, and whoever holds the job can expect every word they say to be scrutinized.
America’s chief bond salesman, tasked with maintaining investors’ faith in the $29 trillion Treasury market.
He’ll want to avoid any repeat of Tim Geithner’s now infamous 2008 Cash Room speech, which led to a split-screen CNBC image of President Barack Obama’s newly minted Treasury chief haltingly delivering his first speech — devoid of details — alongside a rolling list of stocks dropping with each word he spoke.
Missing a payment or delaying a Treasury auction would not create a storm in a teacup — it would spell calamity across the world.
It would take a lot for the dollar’s global role to come apart, and that prediction has come and gone many times in the past half-century.
George W. Bush went through two Treasury chiefs before he got to his now-legendary choice of Paulson.
Saleha Mohsin Bloomberg 17 april 2025
Saleha Mohsin is the senior Washington correspondent for Bloomberg News and the author of Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order .
Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order .
https://www.amazon.com/Paper-Soldiers-Weaponization-Dollar-Changed/dp/0593539117
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; den vuxne i Trumps rum; Soros, Carl Bildt, Mrs Thatcher och Luxonen
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/04/treasury-secretary-scott-bessent-den.html
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs
By Bush administration standards, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is a good guy. He isn’t conspicuously incompetent; and he isn’t trying to mislead us into war, justify torture or protect corrupt contractors.
Paul Krugman, NYT, December 10, 2007
https://www.internetional.se/hmp.htm
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
warned heavily indebted countries not to resort to draconian measures to fix their budgets.
"If every time economic growth disappoints, governments are forced to cut spending or raise taxes immediately to make up for the impact of weaker growth on deficits, this would risk a self-reinforcing negative spiral of growth-killing austerity," he said.
Reuters, 20 March 2012
https://www.nejtillemu.com/spricker.htm#0312Geithner
Stress Test is the story of Tim Geithner’s education in financial crises. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then as President Barack Obama’s secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery.
This is the inside story of how a small group of policy makers—in a thick fog of uncertainty, with unimaginably high stakes—helped avoid a second depression but lost the American people doing it.
Stress Test is also a valuable guide to how governments can better manage financial crises, because this one won’t be the last.
How a dollar crisis would unfold
If investors keep selling American assets, a grim fate awaits the world economy
The shocking thing is that a full-blown bond-market crisis is easy to imagine.
Foreigners own $8.5trn of government debt, a bit under a third of the total; more than half of that is held by private investors, who cannot be cajoled by diplomacy or threatened with tariffs.
America must refinance $9trn of debt over the next year.
If demand for Treasuries weakens, the impact will quickly feed through to the budget, which, owing to high debts and short maturities, is sensitive to interest rates.
The Economist 16 April 2025
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/16/how-a-dollar-crisis-would-unfold
Mr Greenspan described the new world in 2002:
“The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the enhanced resilience of our largest financial institutions. As a result, not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more stable.”
That must rank high among observations the speaker wishes he had not made.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of leading institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief,” Mr Greenspan told Congress last year.
“The whole intellectual edifice [the modern risk management paradigm] collapsed in the summer of last year.”
John Kay, FT December 28 2009
https://www.ft.com/content/7ae08d02-f3eb-11de-ac55-00144feab49a
https://www.internetional.se/derivatives.htm#alan2002
Alan Greenspan
https://www.internetional.se/assetpricebubbles.htm
Håller världen på att tappa tron på den allsmäktiga amerikanska dollarn?
Utlänningar äger 19 tn dollar i amerikanska aktier, 7 tn i amerikanska statsobligationer och 5 tn dollar i amerikanska företagsobligationer
Om utflödena tar fart, kan det så småningom till och med urholka dollarns unika roll i den globala ekonomin och det finansiella systemet?
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/04/haller-varlden-pa-att-tappa-tron-pa-den.html
Globalization has had a grievous effect on US manufacturing jobs that has stoked inequality. This isn’t populist myth-making; it’s been a fire-alarm for economists, politicians, and Main Street for well over a decade.
This is why a large chunk of the US population can be convinced that the rest of the world has ripped them off. Deindustrialization and rising inequality wouldn’t have happened without globalization.
The US economy grew throughout, yet nobody found a way to redeploy the people impoverished by globalization.
That wasn’t inevitable, and can’t be fixed by blocking off imports.
The government might have intervened to stop inequality reaching this point, most logically with the traditional left-wing remedy of redistributive taxation.
That’s a complete no-no in contemporary US political culture
John Authers Bloomberg 14 april 2025
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/04/why-is-us-complaining.html
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