Bessent Copies CZ's Playbook: Treasury Secretary Latest to Tell FT 'You Got It All Wrong'

Scott Bessent just did something crypto Twitter would fully understand—he publicly dragged the Financial Times with the kind of energy usually reserved for rug pulls and exit scams. The US Treasury Secretary accused the FT of fabricating a story claiming he supported modeling Treasury-Fed relations on the Bank of England framework. In a statement that would sound familiar to anyone who followed the Binance drama, Bessent called the reporting "explicitly false" and said journalists ignored his direct, on-the-record rejection. Basically, the FT tried to mint a policy position that never existed—and got rekt in the process.

The FT had reported that Bessent discussed tightening Treasury oversight of the Fed by adopting elements of the BoE's model, including letter-writing mechanisms between the chancellor and the central bank governor. Think of it as the financial equivalent of your parents sending each other strongly-worded notes about your allowance. The newspaper presented this as some grand strategic shift, complete with anonymous sources whispering about regulatory overhaul. Except, according to Bessent, the whole thing was fan fiction.

"FT has literally manufactured an entirely fake policy position for the Administration and me," Bessent wrote on X. The caps lock energy alone sent certain signals, but he backed it up with receipts—pointing to his own 20,000-plus words of published commentary on Fed reform, where no such proposal exists. He also dismissed the BoE's governor-chancellor letter system as "useless and perfunctory." Ouch. That's like calling someone's trading strategy "cute but ineffective."

Crypto audiences immediately recognized the move. Back in September 2025, Binance co-founder CZ launched a near-identical attack on the FT after it reported that his investment firm YZi Labs planned to raise external capital. CZ called that story "completely false news" built on "fake/wrong/made-up info and negative narratives." The playbook looked suspiciously similar—both accused the FT of relying on anonymous sourcing to manufacture positions they never held and of ignoring explicit denials provided on the record. Either there's a ghostwriter in the treasury, or this is just how powerful people handle media when they get caught (or don't get caught, depending on your conspiracy of choice).

CZ didn't stop there. He's also taken shots at the Wall Street Journal over allegations that more than $1 billion in crypto transactions tied to Iran-linked networks flowed through Binance. Classic CZ—punching back at multiple publications like he's playing whack-a-mole with FUD. Whether you think he's defending the ecosystem or just defending his legacy, the pattern is clear: