Treasury Secretary Rug-Pulls the Financial Times in Public Feud

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has leveled accusations that the Financial Times completely fabricated a story, alleging the paper claimed he supported remodeling the Treasury-Fed relationship after the Bank of England. It’s the kind of creative writing that would make a degen's "trust me bro" pitch look rigorously sourced.

Bessent branded the FT piece “explicitly false,” claiming journalists brazenly ignored his direct, on-the-record rejection of their entire premise. The report had suggested Bessent floated tightening Treasury oversight of the Fed by cribbing notes from the BoE's playbook, a narrative he’s now thoroughly dumping on.

“FT has literally manufactured an entirely fake policy position for the Administration and me,” Bessent declared. He pointed to his own voluminous, 20,000-plus word corpus of published Fed reform thoughts as proof the idea is pure fiction, dismissing the BoE’s governor-chancellor letter system as “useless and perfunctory” for good measure.

This public confrontation rings a bell for anyone in crypto, sounding a lot like a re-roll of a classic hit. Back in September 2025, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (CZ) launched a nearly identical broadside against the FT over a report that his investment firm, YZi Labs, planned to raise external capital.

CZ had labeled that story “completely false news” built on “fake/wrong/made-up info and negative narratives.” The parallels are uncanny: both accuse the FT of using shadowy anonymous sources to mint policy positions out of thin air, while conveniently ignoring explicit, on-the-record denials.

Staying on-brand, CZ recently took a similar swing at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), going on the offensive after it alleged over $1 billion in crypto tied to Iran-linked networks had flowed through his exchange. When it comes to legacy media, some folks just have a type.

While this spat is ostensibly about monetary policy sovereignty, Bessent remains a key architect for US crypto regulation. He’s publicly championed a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, pushed for stablecoin laws, and backed the CLARITY Act for market structure—moves watched more closely than a whale's wallet.

Any seismic shift in the Treasury-Fed power dynamic could send tremors into crypto via monetary policy signals, stablecoin demand, and regulatory tone. Bessent has previously described the Fed’s QE programs as a “gain-of-function monetary policy experiment,” a phrase that hints he’s ready to fork the entire system.

In a related subplot, Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to succeed Fed Chair Jay Powell in May 2026, has separately signaled interest in BoE-style accountability tools during financial crises. Because nothing says stability like importing ideas from a system one party just called "useless."

Whether the FT's narrative holds or gets liquidated under Bessent's rebuttal, the trend of powerful figures publicly dumping on legacy media via X shows no signs of cooling off. For the crypto crowd, it's just another episode of "Mainstream Media FUD: The Series."