The Beclowning of Scott Bessent
Paul Krugman argues that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suffered a significant loss of credibility due to his association with Donald Trump and failed market interventions. Bessent's attempts to lower long-term interest rates by purchasing 30-year U.S. Treasuries have backfired as rates hit new highs driven by elevated oil prices and inflation. The article suggests that Bessent's continued support for Trump's optimistic predictions regarding the Iran conflict further undermines his professional reputation.
- ▪Scott Bessent attempted to lower long-term interest rates by buying 30-year U.S. Treasuries, a move that has not succeeded as rates remain at high levels.
- ▪Interest rates have spiked due to rising oil prices following Trump's rejection of an Iranian proposal to end the war, which keeps inflation elevated.
- ▪Bessent previously boasted about his ability to move markets by declaring 'I am the house now' after intervening to support the Japanese yen.
- ▪The article notes that a shipping crunch is occurring as large crude carriers wait off the coast of Oman to be loaded with oil from smaller vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
- ▪Krugman contends that working for Donald Trump destroys political credibility, citing Bessent's transformation from a respected economist to a figure associated with failed policy predictions.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 2,347 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Front Page) |
| Canonical URL | https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-beclowning-of-scott-bessent |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 11:51:28 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T12:47:31.899Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T12:47:31.899Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DhiRrKhyk3MR · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Beclowning of Scott BessentAnother Trump enabler pays the pricePaul KrugmanSep 29, 20264,333620750ShareOne iron law of current politics is that nobody who associates themselves with Donald Trump emerges with a shred of credibility. For some, that’s not a big loss — it’s not as if anyone respected Pete Hegseth even before he decided that the key to military success in an age of drones and AI was more testosterone. For others, however, the costs are real. I’m old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was widely considered a reasonable, thoughtful politician.Right now, however, my candidate for the biggest loser is Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Front Page).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (Front Page)
