Donald Trump, the next president, has announced his picks for a number of important government jobs, but he has not yet announced his choice for Treasury secretary.
Some of his top picks are hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, but there are still other names in the running. As the country’s chief financial officer and the president’s major economic advisor, the head of the Treasury Department is a very important job.
It was Lutnick’s job as co-chair of Trump’s transition team in 2024 to hire people, but now he wants to hire someone himself. Several news outlets have said that some people who support Trump think that Bessent doesn’t back up his plans to put tariffs on imported goods enough.
Lutnick, on the other hand, told a Trump crowd last month that America was great about 125 years ago when it “had no income tax and all we had were tariffs.” He also said that tariffs were “an amazing tool” in a September talk with CNBC. A big part of his fame comes from the fact that he ran the privately owned investment bank and brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which 658 of its workers died.
Of course, Bessent, who is the founder and CEO of Key Square Capital Management, has also said some nice things about taxes. It was last month in an Economist column that he said “broad-based tariffs” would work better than “microeconomic interventions like industrial policy that generally rely on the government to pick winners and losers.”
Bessent has also often supported the president-elect’s economic policies. He used to be the chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management, the company started by famous investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros. That was in July, when he told MarketWatch that the idea that they would cause inflation was “mad.”
Trump wants all imports to be taxed at 10% or up to 20%, and he wants to tax Chinese goods extra 60%.
There are also other names that have been going around for the Treasury job. Trump could choose Robert Lighthizer, who is known for supporting taxes when he was U.S. trade representative in the first Trump administration.
A story in the Wall Street Journal on Friday citing anonymous sources said that the president-elect has also thought about Larry Kudlow for top economic jobs like National Economic Council director and maybe even Treasury secretary. According to unnamed sources in a Bloomberg News report, Kudlow told the president-elect’s team that he doesn’t want a part in the second term. Kudlow is a host on the Fox Business Network and led the NEC during the first Trump administration.
People have also talked about Jay Clayton, who was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term. However, Trump named Clayton for U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on Thursday. John Paulson, the famous billionaire investor, dropped out of the race for Treasury earlier this week.
If you bet on it, Polymarket said that Bessent had a 71% chance of becoming the Treasury choice on Friday afternoon, while Lutnick only had an 18% chance. Lighthizer had 7% and Kudlow had 3%. Steve Mnuchin, who was Trump’s cabinet secretary during his first term, was at 1%. Mnuchin has said that he doesn’t want to do the job again.
It was three weeks after Trump won the 2016 election before Mnuchin was announced as the person Trump chose to lead the Treasury.
