The Currency Killer: Scott Bessent
Sid Shniad
The Currency Killer: Scott Bessent
He broke five currencies and made billions. Then, he got the keys to the USD. All while having connections to Epstein and Ehud Barak.
Leah
Aug 25, 2026
Between August 11 and August 24, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent executed a sequence of decisions that, taken together, amount to the most aggressive restructuring of the American financial system in modern history. He did it in thirteen days and it’s being buried in the news…for good reason.
On August 11, Bessent killed the Corporate Transparency Act and ordered the FinCEN beneficial ownership database deleted. Three days later, the President’s family crypto company received a federal bank charter. Three days after that, Bessent published rules requiring every stablecoin in America to hold its reserves in Treasury bills. The national debt crossed $40 trillion the next day. On August 19, he doubled the Treasury’s bond buyback program, the same mechanism he once used to make $3.5 billion breaking Japan’s currency. And on August 24, he announced “Operation Economic Outcast” and threatened to cut entire countries off from the dollar system.
I built a model to measure how close the United States is to a currency crisis. I took the seven indicators that preceded every major currency collapse since 1992 and checked the U.S. against each one. Unfortunately, all seven are present. The historical record says that has never happened without a crisis following within twenty-four months.
The model turned out to be the easy part. The harder thing to explain is what I found behind the numbers: a system that appears designed not just to weaken the dollar, but to profit from the weakening. And the man running it has spent forty years doing exactly that to other countries.
The Man Behind the US Dollar
Scott Bessent’s career has one through line. He finds countries whose governments are weakening their own currencies, he bets against those currencies, and he collects when they break.
He started on George Soros’s team in the early 1990s. In 1992, Soros shorted the British pound on Black Wednesday and made a billion dollars in a single day. Bessent was part of that trade, living in London and running the London office at the time. He went on to become Soros Fund Management’s chief investment officer, where he ran what the Wall Street Journal called the most profitable currency bet in the fund’s history: the yen.
Japan’s government had been buying its own bonds to suppress interest rates, which had the side effect of weakening the yen. Bessent recognized the pattern, shorted the currency, and made $3.5 billion when it crashed. The Wall Street Journal called him “The Man Who Broke the Bank of Japan.” Fortune wrote that he “made a fortune spotting currency manipulation.”
He left Soros in 2015 and started his own fund, Key Square Capital, running the same strategy. Then Donald Trump nominated him for Treasury Secretary, and the man who had spent his career betting against vulnerable currencies was handed control of the most important one on earth.
** Side note: If you want more about his time at Soros and how he failed at Key Square Capital, check out my “Follow the Money” article on Scott Bessent from a few months back.
What he has done since becoming the US Treasury Secretary with control of the US Dollar is worth a closer look.
He crashed the Iranian rial from 700,000 to 2 million per dollar through sanctions. Rice prices in Iran went up 60% and beef went up 150%. The broader conflict cost American consumers $53 billion in higher gas prices, according to the Dallas Fed.
He used between $20 and $40 billion in American taxpayer money to prop up Argentina’s peso ahead of a political ally’s midterm elections. Ignore the fact his friend was the one who got rich off this bailout (see original Bessent Follow the Money article).
He blockaded Cuba’s economy and tourism collapsed by half with rolling blackouts becoming a permanent normalcy. To make matters worse, the country has posted three straight years of negative GDP.
The pattern is consistent. When the target is an adversary, he destroys their currency. When the target is an ally, he props theirs up with American money. In both cases, the American public pays.
The Japan Mirror
On August 19, Bessent’s Treasury doubled its bond buyback program to at least $4 billion per operation. The mechanics are pretty straightforward: the government buys its own long-dated bonds, which pushes prices up and yields down. Borrowing gets cheaper in the short term and the currency weakens.
This is the Japan trade. It is the exact mechanism Bessent identified, exploited, and profited from when he was on the other side of the table. The only difference is that he is now running it himself, with the U.S. dollar.
Robin Brooks at the Brookings Institution published a warning three days ago. He said Bessent is “playing with fire” and risks triggering “a devaluation spiral like the yen.” He added that “as Japan shows, it can be next to impossible to stabilize a currency once it enters a devaluation spiral.”
Bessent has built the Treasury General Account to $950 billion, nearly double what the Biden administration maintained. Reports indicate he may tap this reserve to fund additional buybacks. He has effectively assembled a trillion-dollar war chest to run the Japan playbook on the American dollar.
He is running the Treasury the way he ran a hedge fund. The difference is that the capital belongs to you. And if you’ve read my Follow the Money on Scott Bessent, you know that he failed at running a hedge fund.
Seven Out of Seven
As an economist, I have studied historical currency collapses for years and I found that every major one in modern history followed a pattern. I identified seven indicators that were present before the collapse. And I wanted to know how many of those indicators are currently present in the United States.
The answer…all of them.
Indicator 1: The government is buying its own bonds
On August 19, Bessent doubled the Treasury's bond buyback program. Operations now run at $4 billion or more each. He has built the Treasury General Account to $950 billion, nearly double what the Biden administration maintained. CNBC reports he may tap this reserve for even more buybacks. This is the same mechanism he used to crash the yen when he was at Soros Fund.
Indicator 2: Debt-to-GDP has crossed 100%
The United States is at 125.8%. The national debt crossed $40 trillion on August 18. For context, Argentina’s debt-to-GDP was 62% when it defaulted in 2001. Turkey’s was 30% when the lira collapsed in 2018. Venezuela’s was 50%. The U.S. is higher than all of them.
Indicator 3: Interest payments are consuming more than 15% of government revenue
The U.S. is at 19%. One out of every five dollars the government collects goes to paying interest on money it already owes. The CBO projects interest costs will hit $2.1 trillion per year by 2036. The United States has already crossed the threshold that preceded Argentina’s default.
Indicator 4: Foreign holders are reducing their positions
Foreign official Treasury holdings at the Fed are at yearly lows. China has been pulling back for months. BRICS nations now settle 67% of their mutual trade without using the dollar at all. The buyers who used to fund American debt are leaving.
Indicator 5: The dollar's share of global reserves is declining
The dollar has dropped below 57%, the lowest level since 1995. In 2001, the dollar accounted for 73% of global reserves. It has lost 17% points in 25 years, and the decline is accelerating. The world is walking away from the dollar.
Indicator 6: Financial oversight is being dismantled
On August 11, Bessent killed the Corporate Transparency Act and ordered the FinCEN beneficial ownership database deleted. That was the one law requiring shell companies to report who owns them. It was the tool investigators would use to trace who is buying stablecoins, who is routing money through USD1, and where the profits are going. He deleted it three days before the President’s family received a federal bank charter for their crypto company.
Indicator 7: Political interference in fiscal policy
Bond buybacks are being used to suppress yields and weaken the currency. A $950 billion war chest has been assembled for more. The Treasury wrote the rules implementing the GENIUS Act, which directly benefits the President's own company. And "Operation Economic Outcast" is weaponizing sanctions to drive countries off the dollar system entirely. The Brookings Institution published a paper calling this "playing with fire."
In the historical record, four of these indicators meant a crisis was likely. Five meant it was almost certain. I found all seven.
Operation Economic Outcast
On August 24, Bessent held a press conference and announced what he called “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary.” He sanctioned nearly 60 corporations, individuals, and vessels connected to Iran. He introduced five new categories of secondary sanctions targeting digital assets, cryptocurrency, gold, aviation, and shipping. He seized $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency.
Then he said: “Any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the U.S. dollar system. The clock just started ticking.”
When asked whether Chinese banks would be exempt, he said “no one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions.”
The Treasury Secretary of the United States just threatened to cut entire nations off from the dollar. He did this while actively weakening the dollar through buybacks. While the debt just crossed $40 trillion. While he had just gutted the financial transparency system, and while the President’s family owns the only federally chartered private digital dollar [bank] in existence.
Countries that get cut off from the dollar system still need a way to transact in dollars. The only private digital dollar with a federal bank charter is USD1, owned by the Trump family. Bessent is driving countries away from the dollar while the President’s family owns the replacement.
The Digital Dollar Play
Let’s play connect the dots.
On January 23, 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning any federal agency from creating a Central Bank Digital Currency. No government digital dollar, ever. He eliminated the only thing that could have competed with a private one.
Two months later, his family’s company, World Liberty Financial, launched USD1, a private stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by Treasury bills. The Trump family receives 75% of net profits. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, owns 49%. USD1 now has $4.6 billion in circulation.
In May 2025, Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund routed a $2 billion investment in Binance through USD1 specifically. That single transaction represented 75% of USD1’s total market cap at the time. Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy, announced the deal from a stage in Dubai.
Congress then passed the GENIUS Act, which requires every stablecoin issuer in the United States to back its tokens with Treasury bills maturing within 93 days. This means every dollar of USD1 in circulation must purchase government debt. Brookings projects that stablecoin holdings of Treasury bills could reach $2.3 trillion by 2030.
On August 14, the OCC, run by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould, granted World Liberty Financial a conditional federal bank charter. The President’s family crypto company can now issue USD1 directly, with federal authority.
Now let’s follow the money through the loop.
The President banned the government from building the competition, then the Trump family built the product. His appointee gave them a bank charter. Congress passed a law requiring it to buy government debt. His Treasury Secretary is weakening the real dollar to drive adoption of the digital one, and his Treasury Secretary is now cutting countries off from the dollar system, pushing them toward the private replacement his family owns.
Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure reported $1.4 billion in crypto income. That is more than he made from real estate. $550 million came from World Liberty Financial token sales. $600 million came from meme coins. His family has taken at least $1.2 billion in cash from WLF in sixteen months.
Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter reviewed the disclosures and said this level of conflict “would be a violation” for every other executive branch employee. But there is no enforcement mechanism for a sitting president.
The Epstein Connection
There is one more thread, and it is the one that explains why the financial transparency infrastructure had to be destroyed.
In August 2024, a hacker group called Handala breached the personal email archive of Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel. Barak was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates. He visited Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse dozens of times, invested in companies alongside Epstein, and has never denied the relationship. The emails were published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a legitimate transparency organization. Journalists Jack Poulson and Harrison Berger spent months going through them and published their findings in September 2025.
What they found was a direct, documented financial relationship between Ehud Barak and Scott Bessent.
The emails show Barak communicating with senior Soros Fund executives about Bessent’s currency trades. They used code names. Bessent was referred to as “Sterling.” A major yen trade was called “Ichiban,” the Japanese word for number one. There are emails from August 2013, December 2013, May 2014, February 2015, and May 2015 documenting meetings, fund seeding discussions involving $100 million to $450 million, and ongoing financial coordination between Barak and Bessent.
Barak’s corporate structure was designed by Darren Indyke, Epstein’s personal lawyer. Epstein’s Southern Trust Company invested 50% into the entity. The same entity that took consulting payments from Bessent’s fund is the same entity that controlled where Epstein’s money went.
Bessent is also blocking the release of $1.5 billion worth of Epstein’s Suspicious Activity Reports: 4,725 flagged wire transfers from JPMorgan and $378 million from BNY Mellon. Senator Ron Wyden introduced the PETRA bill to force their release. A Republican senator blocked it. Wyden called Bessent “a willing participant in a cover-up.” And he is.
On August 11, Bessent killed the Corporate Transparency Act and deleted the FinCEN database. Three days later, the bank charter was approved. The man with documented financial ties to Epstein’s business partner is not just running the Treasury, he is dismantling the infrastructure that would allow anyone to trace what is happening now.
The Verdict in Gold
Gold closed at $5,595 an ounce. That is a 216% increase over six years. Central banks are not speculating on gold, they are hedging against the dollar, moving reserves out of Treasuries and into something that does not depend on the decisions of one government.
When I started building the collapse indicator model, I expected to find four or five indicators present. The historical precedent suggested four was the threshold where a crisis becomes likely. Five makes it almost certain.
I am very alarmed at finding all seven.
What Comes Next
I am not predicting that the dollar collapses tomorrow. Reserve currencies do not die overnight. The British pound took decades to lose its status as the global reserve. But it did lose it, and when it happened, the standard of living in Britain fell for a generation.
What I am saying is something I would not have believed I would be writing two months ago. The decline of the dollar does not appear to be an accident, and it does not appear to be incompetence. It appears to be the mechanism by which a privately owned, family-controlled digital dollar, backed by a legal mandate to purchase government debt, becomes the replacement for a weakening reserve currency. And the man implementing the strategy has spent forty years doing exactly this to other countries for profit.
Bessent’s “3-3-3” plan promised 3% growth, 3% deficit reduction, and 3 million barrels of new oil production. The deficit is running at 5.8%. Growth has stalled. The debt hit $40 trillion. The plan was a brochure. The real plan is the one he has always run: suppress yields, weaken the currency, and let someone else absorb the consequences. Except this time, the consequences land on you and I, and the profits are not going to a hedge fund, they are going to the President of the United States.
Here is what to watch. If Bessent draws down the Treasury General Account for additional buybacks, that is the Japan signal. If USD1 circulation accelerates past $10 billion, the replacement is scaling. Watch the dollar index below 95. Watch gold. Watch foreign Treasury holdings. Every step so far has been taken in plain sight, sourced by mainstream outlets, and almost nobody connected them…until now.
I have studied failing governments, currency collapses, and economies getting hollowed out by people who knew exactly what they were doing. What I just walked you through is an 8-step playbook to privatize the reserve function of the United States dollar for personal profit. Every step has already been executed. The institutions were captured, the competition was banned, the product was built, the law was rigged, the charter was granted, the dollar was weakened, and the paper trail was destroyed. Their loop is running.
If this is not what is happening, then I need someone to explain to me what is. Because I have been looking for the innocent version of this story. The version where a president bans the government digital dollar and then builds his own, gets it a bank charter, passes a law forcing it to buy government debt, installs a Treasury Secretary who weakens the real dollar, deletes the financial transparency database, and starts cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely, and none of it is connected. I have been looking for that version and I simply cannot find it.
If you can, I am listening.
His entire career tells you what happens next.
So What Can You Do About It?
This is not financial advice. This is what I am personally considering.
Please tell us your tips in the comments!
If the playbook I just described is real, and every step has already been executed, then the question is not whether the dollar weakens, it is how much and how fast. And the follow-up question is what an ordinary person can do about it when the people in charge are the ones engineering it.
There are two categories here. The first is protecting yourself financially. The second is doing something to stop it.
What I Am Personally Considering
Again, I am not a financial advisor and this is not advice. I am sharing my own thought process.
The core problem is simple. If the dollar loses purchasing power, anything denominated in dollars loses real value. Cash in a savings account earning 4% does not help you if the dollar drops 9%. You are going backward. So the question is what holds value when the dollar does not?
Gold: This is the oldest hedge against currency devaluation in history and there is a reason central banks around the world are buying it at record pace right now. Gold is at $5,595 an ounce. It is up 216% in six years. Central banks are buying it because they are watching the same indicators I just showed you and they are hedging. I am thinking about physical gold, not paper ETFs. If the system breaks, you want the actual thing.
Real assets: Land, property, things that exist in the physical world and hold value regardless of what a currency does. When Argentina’s peso collapsed, people who owned land and property survived, but people who held pesos did not. Real estate in the United States has its own problems, but the building and the land underneath it do not disappear when the dollar weakens. They get repriced.
International diversification: If the dollar weakens, assets denominated in other currencies go up relative to the dollar. I am looking at my portfolio and asking how much of it is entirely dependent on the dollar holding its value. For most Americans, the answer is almost all of it. That is a concentration risk. International index funds, accounts denominated in Swiss francs or Singapore dollars, exposure to economies that are not running this playbook.
I-Bonds and TIPS: This is the ironic one. The government sells bonds that adjust for inflation. I-Bonds are capped at $10,000 per year per person, and they pay a rate that adjusts with the Consumer Price Index. Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities do the same thing but trade on the open market. If the dollar weakens and inflation rises, these adjust upward. You are essentially betting against the government’s own policy using the government’s own product.
Fixed-rate debt: This one is counterintuitive. If you have a 30-year mortgage at a fixed rate and the dollar loses value, you are paying back that loan with cheaper dollars. Your monthly payment stays the same but the real cost of it drops. People who had fixed-rate mortgages during periods of high inflation came out ahead. I am not saying go take on debt. I am saying if you already have a fixed-rate mortgage, do not rush to pay it off. The math may be working in your favor.
Reduce large cash positions: A savings account is a bet on the dollar holding its value. If you are sitting on a large amount of cash in dollars, you are fully exposed. I am not saying empty your savings account. I am saying think about what percentage of your net worth is just sitting in dollars earning a rate that may not keep up with the real rate of devaluation. The dollar index has dropped 8.8% since January 2025. If your savings account paid 4%, you lost ground.
Watch the stablecoin market: This sounds strange, but if this playbook is real, stablecoin adoption is the metric that tells you how fast it is working. USD1 is at $4.6 billion. If it crosses $10 billion, the replacement is scaling. If total stablecoin T-bill holdings approach the numbers Brookings is projecting, the shift is happening. You can track this in real time. It is public.
What You Can Do to Stop It
Hedging is defense, this section is our offense.
Contact your senators and representatives: Not a form email. Call their office. The specific ask is this: demand hearings on the conflict of interest between the President’s ownership of World Liberty Financial and the Treasury Department’s implementation of the GENIUS Act. Demand reinstatement of the Corporate Transparency Act. Demand release of the Epstein Suspicious Activity Reports that Bessent is blocking. Those are three concrete, specific demands that any staffer can write down. A call takes three minutes.
Support the PETRA Act: Senator Ron Wyden introduced legislation to force the release of $1.5 billion in Epstein financial records that Bessent is sitting on. A Republican senator blocked it. The bill still exists. Call your senator and ask them to co-sponsor it. If the financial ties between Bessent, Barak, and the Epstein network are real, those records are the proof.
Demand a GAO investigation: The Government Accountability Office is the one independent body that can audit the Treasury’s buyback decisions. They can determine whether buyback timing and size decisions are being made to benefit stablecoin markets or to serve the public interest. A GAO investigation does not require the President’s permission. It requires a congressional request. Call your representative.
File FOIA requests: The Treasury Department’s internal communications about buyback timing, GENIUS Act implementation, and the World Liberty Financial bank charter are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. Organizations like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen, and the Sunlight Foundation file these. Support them financially. If you are a journalist, file them yourself. The paper trail is there.
State attorneys general: State AGs have independent authority to investigate fraud and conflicts of interest that affect their residents. Every American whose purchasing power is declining because of this playbook is an affected resident. If your state attorney general is independent, contact their office and ask whether they are looking at this. Several AGs have already taken action on related crypto issues. This is a natural extension.
Make it politically expensive: This is the one that actually works. Every one of these decisions, the CTA repeal, the bank charter, the buybacks, the sanctions, was made because the people making them believed there would be no political cost. They believed nobody would connect the steps. The single most effective thing you can do is make sure that assumption is wrong. Share this article. Share the sourced version. Tag your representatives. Make them answer for it on the record. The only thing protecting this scheme is the fact that not enough people understand it yet.
I wrote this piece because I believe people deserve to know what is being done with their currency and who is profiting from it. I am not asking you to panic. I am asking you to pay attention, protect yourself, and make noise.
This is what I am doing. You make your own choices, but you can make them with your eyes open now.
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Sources & Documentation
Currency History & Career: NPR: “George Soros, British Pound, Bessent, Druckenmiller” (Dec 2024); Wall Street Journal: “The Man Who Broke the Bank of Japan.” $3.5B yen trade; Fortune: “Scott Bessent made a fortune spotting currency manipulation” (May 2026); Britannica: Scott Bessent profile.
Bond Buybacks & Dollar Decline: CNBC: “Treasury doubles debt buybacks” (Aug 19, 2026); CNBC: “Bessent could tap near $1T TGA for bond buybacks” (Aug 24, 2026); Brookings Institution: “Bessent is playing with fire” (Aug 21, 2026); Brookings Institution: “Buybacks risk a devaluation spiral like the yen”; Axios: “Dollar debasement talk returns” (Aug 21, 2026); Trading Economics: Dollar index at 99. 8.8% decline since Jan 2025.
Operation Economic Outcast: Washington Post: “Bessent unveils sweeping sanctions campaign against Iran” (Aug 24, 2026)'; NPR: “Treasury Secretary Bessent unveils new economic sanctions” (Aug 24, 2026); CNBC: “Trump admin unveils anti-Iran global sanctions plan” (Aug 24, 2026); NBC News: “Bessent threatens Iran secondary sanctions” (Aug 24, 2026); Axios: “Bessent announces D-Day sanctions against Iran” (Aug 24, 2026).
Crypto, Stablecoins & GENIUS Act: CNBC: “World Liberty Financial gets conditional bank charter” (Aug 14, 2026); Treasury.gov: GENIUS Act Proposed Rulemaking (SB0605, Aug 17, 2026); Quartz: “How Trump’s crypto push connects to Bessent’s Treasury strategy” (Aug 24, 2026); TIME: “Trump Reports Over $1 Billion in Income From Crypto” (Jul 1, 2026); NPR: “Trump’s crypto poses clear conflict of interest” (Jul 2, 2026); Brookings: “Stablecoins after GENIUS: Private money, public debt, and the global dollar”; Bloomberg: “Trump-Tied Stablecoin Used for MGX’s $2B Binance Deal” (May 2025); nCenter for American Progress: “How Trump’s $500M UAE Crypto Deal Trades National Security for Family Profit”; Public Citizen: “Conflict Coin: How the Trumps’ Billion-Dollar Crypto Stake”; Senate Banking Committee: Warren/Merkley letter on $2B USD1 deal; Banking Dive: “Trump order embraces stablecoins, bars CBDCs” (Jan 2025); Richmond Fed: “Stablecoins and the Demand for Dollars” (2026).
Debt, Interest & Economy: CNN: “The national debt just hit $40 trillion” (Aug 23, 2026); Peter G. Peterson Foundation: Interest costs at all-time highs; CBO: $1T interest in 2026, $2.1T by 2036; IMF: U.S. debt at 125.8% of GDP.
De-Dollarization & Gold: Informed Clearly: “Dollar Reserve Share Below 57%.”; Watcher Guru: “BRICS De-Dollarization.” 67% intra-bloc local currency trade; Investing News: Gold $5,595/oz all-time high. $19B ETF inflows Jan 2026.
FinCEN & Corporate Transparency Act: Washington Post: “Treasury ends ownership reporting rules” (Aug 11, 2026); TechTimes: “Treasury Kills CTA, Erases Database” (Aug 13, 2026); Senator Warren statement, Senate Banking Committee (Aug 12, 2026).
Epstein Records & Bessent-Barak: Jack Poulson/All-Source Intelligence: “How private intelligence brought the U.S. treasury secretary into contact with Epstein’s corporate web” (Sep 29, 2025); Distributed Denial of Secrets: Ehud Barak email archive (Aug 2024); Senate Finance Committee: Wyden expands Epstein investigation (Sep 2025); Senate Finance Committee: “Republican Blocks Wyden Bill” (Mar 2026).
Iran, Argentina, Cuba: Asia Times: “Iran war cost US consumers $53 billion.” Dallas Fed data; Fortune: “U.S. launches financial rescue of Argentina” (Oct 2025); CounterPunch: “Cuba after Six Months of the Oil Blockade” (Aug 2026).
Historical Collapse Comparisons: SF Fed: “Learning from Argentina’s Crisis” (Oct 2002); OMFIF: “Sri Lanka crisis shows why reserves matter” (Jul 2022); RSM/Brookings: Japan 260% debt-to-GDP. BoJ holds 50%+ of bonds; Mises Institute: German hyperinflation analysis.
— Leah