Bessent Blasts Financial Times Over ‘Fabricated’ Story on Federal Reserve Oversight

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent excoriated the Financial Times on Thursday, calling the British newspaper “tabloid trash” and accusing its journalists of fabricating a story claiming he had praised the Bank of England’s governance structure as a model for tightening oversight of the Federal Reserve.

The FT reported Wednesday that Bessent had discussed adopting elements of the BoE’s relationship with the UK Treasury — including a system of formal letter-writing between the central bank governor and the chancellor of the exchequer — as a template for restructuring the Fed’s relationship with the U.S. government. The story attributed the claim to unnamed “financial industry executives familiar with the matter.”

Bessent responded on social media with a blistering denial, calling the story “explicitly false” and “100 per cent fake news.” He said he had provided a “direct, on-the-record denial” to FT reporters before publication and accused them of running the story