Scott Bessent, founder and chief executive officer of Key Square Group LP, during an interview in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, June 7, 2024. Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg

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American voters have reason to be happy with the economy, which polls as their number one priority. Consumer inflation has fallen to under 3%, down from the highs of 9% in 2022. The economy grew 2.8% in the third quarter, extending a two-year stretch of GDP growth. Stock markets are hovering near all-time highs. Whoever becomes president will “inherit a remarkable economy,” Greg Ip, The Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, wrote in a widely shared story last week.

Scott Bessent, the founder of hedge fund Key Square Management, paints a grimmer picture. The 62-year-old investor, whose name has been floated as a potential U.S. Treasury Secretary in a second Trump administration, contends that the economy is in dire straits.

“We have these budget deficits we’ve never seen before when we’re not in a recession or war,” Bessent told Forbes in a phone interview Monday morning from The Yale Club (his alma mater) in New York City, before jetting to Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids to join the Trump campaign for its final two rallies.

“Private employment is buckling very quickly,” he says, referencing last week’s jobs report, which showed U.S payrolls only rose by 12,000. “I think in two weeks, we’re going to see that the economy is not in very good shape.”

And as for that Journal story? “I thought it was a complete piece of garbage,” Bessent says. “Debt is growing faster than GDP. Greg would have made a very good Enron analyst; Enron collapsed right after having peak earnings.” (Forbes reached out to Ip and the Journal for comment but at press time has not heard back).

Bessent, who has spent most of his career out of the public spotlight as a mild-mannered hedge fund executive, has joined the political fray in recent months as he’s become a top Trump economic whisperer and campaign surrogate. “I spent most of my life being quite private,” says Bessent, who endorsed Trump early on in the 2024 Republican primaries and has given $3 million to Trump PACs and Republican Party committees this cycle.

For nearly 15 years, Bessent worked for the billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros. He was reportedly instrumental in the Soros fund’s successful bets against the U.K. pound and the Japanese Yen. He launched Key Square Management in 2015, raising $4. 5 billion with a $2 billion anchor investment from his old boss. Its regulatory assets under management had dropped to $577 million as of the end of last year.

The heart of Bessent’s pitch for Trump is that current U.S. economic growth is “government induced” and that the mounting federal debt has created unsustainable conditions. Bessent agrees with Elon Musk (whom Trump wants to put in charge of cost-cutting) that federal spending needs to be reined in, though he demurred when asked about Musk’s proposal to slash a whopping $2 trillion in annual spending. “I’m not sure how they’ve gotten to that number,” Bessent says. “But I look at the way he runs his companies. He runs them pretty well.”

Bessent also claims that inequality has become a growing problem under Biden and Harris’s policies. “The bottom 50% has gotten crushed
 two out of five credit cards are maxed out. Credit card delinquencies are at the highest that they’ve been since they started keeping score in 2012,” he says. “The distributional consequences are terrible and under Trump 1.0, working people did better than high income, high asset households.” (The economic data show more of a mixed bag: Wage inequality decreased under Biden but inflation hit low-wage workers; child poverty nosedived in 2021 but soob “returned to pre-pandemic levels” after a GOP-controlled congress blocked Biden’s attempts to make permanent an expanded child tax credit, a Washington Post analysis found.)

Bessent also has words for the 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists who signed a letter last month, which stated that Harris’s economic agenda is “vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda” of Trump, and that Trump’s proposed policies – including high tariffs and “regressive” tax cuts – will contribute to “higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.”

Bessent says that a majority of the letter’s authors previously vouched Biden’s spending plans wouldn’t increase inflation and called the letter “very disingenuous” and authored by a “highly political group that’s always wrong.”

One of the letter’s signatories, George Akerlof, is the spouse of Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, which Bessent describes as “highly conflicted.” (Forbes reached out to Akerlof for comment but at press time has not heard back).

“They just happened to publish these letters so that Kamala Harris, who’s an economic illiterate, can say, ‘Well, these Nobel Prize winners said this,” says Bessent, who has previously called Harris an “economic illiterate” on Fox Business, and who appears to be taking a page from Trump’s playbook: The former president has called Harris “dumb”, “stupid” and a “low IQ individual” repeatedly on the campaign trail. (A majority of those who watched Trump and Harris debate for an hour and a half apparently disagree with that assessment.) By contrast, Trump “is very sophisticated on economic policy,” Bessent insists. “He has lots of things he wants to talk about.”

Such as? “The economy, positions on tariffs, the Harris proposals, my thoughts on the stock market, what the outlook would be like if she were to win. Things like that.”

The hedge funder also defended his pitch for a shadow Chair of the Federal Reserve, an idea he first described to Barron’s. Under this proposal, Trump would nominate a replacement to the current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a year before his term concludes in May 2026. “My idea is you just get forward guidance and let everyone know who the Fed chair is going to be,” Bessent says. “I actually think it enhances the credibility of the Fed.”

In recent days, the race between Trump and Harris has seemingly tightened as betting markets – which previously showed Trump as favorite – narrowed, and with pollsters describing it as a 50-50 toss up. Bessent says he’s not worried. “I think that a lot of the betting markets are just responding to the news cycle. When I think about investments, I have a long term structural view. And my long term structural view is that Donald Trump’s going to win.”