- Howard Lutnick is a known crypto fan.
- Scott Bessent, Marc Rowan, and Kevin Warsh have also spoken positively about crypto.
- Trump hasn’t picked his Treasury Secretary yet.
The race to become Treasury Secretary under Donald Trump is heating up.
Just last week, Howard Lutnick, CEO of financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and Scott Bessent, founder of investment firm Key Square Capital Management and one of George Soros’ former lieutenants, were leading candidates, according to Reuters.
Now, Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management, and Kevin Warsh, a former member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, are in the running, according to the New York Times.
The head of the US Treasury will have significant influence over crypto’s future in the US. The department not only prints US dollars but also supervises national banks, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FINCEN.
Lutnick, a Trump booster and supporter of the stablecoin Tether, is already a known crypto booster.
What about the other frontrunners?
Scott Bessent
Punters on Polymarket are betting that Scott Bessent has a 37% shot at becoming Treasury Secretary.
That’s three percentage points greater than Lutnick, who has reportedly annoyed Trump for hanging around the incoming president too often and inserting himself into the transition process for his own gain, per the Times.
“Bessent is a business-as-usual choice, whereas [Howard Lutnick] will actually enact change,” Tesla billionaire Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.
Compared to Lutnick, Bessent hasn’t crowed about crypto on the regular. The investor is “sceptical about cryptocurrency,” according to the Associated Press.
However, Bessent struck a more positive tone in an interview with Fox News in July.
“I have been excited about the president’s embrace of crypto,” he said. “Everything is on the table with Bitcoin.”
Kevin Warsh
Compared to the founder of Key Square, Warsh has opined more often about blockchain. However, he focused his remarks on the viability of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.
Bettors believe the former higher-up at the Federal Reserve has a 16% chance of becoming Treasury Secretary, per Polymarket.
In 2018, Warsh told the Times that if he were to return to the Fed he would appoint a team to think about creating a “Fedcoin.”
Warsh has been consistent. In 2022, he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in support of a US CDBC to combat China’s launch of its own digital currency.
“The new digital dollar would strengthen the currency for a new era, and bolster America as leader of the global economic system,” he said.
And in 2023, he reiterated his belief in a hypothetical US digital currency.
“It’s decentralised, in the sense that we’re using the blockchain as the base foundation to conduct this business,” he said on a podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The trail is auditable.”
Marc Rowan
Rowan, whose investment firm specialises in alternative assets, hasn’t made crypto a key part of his public persona.
Polymarket gives the Apollo CEO a 9% shot at nabbing a spot in Trump’s cabinet.
Over the past two years, Rowan has vacillated between full-throated “amazement” of blockchain and more measured “spectator-from-the-sideline” views.
“The ecosystem that’s being built around crypto is nothing short of amazing,” he told Bloomberg in 2022.
“We are moving our securitizations onto blockchain. We’re taking stakes and backing challengers to the financial system,” he added.
Two years later, in a February conversation with economist Tyler Cowen, Rowan tamped down on his enthusiasm.
When asked if crypto would play a role in the “future” of the US financial system, he said that the subject was “out of his depth.”
“I’ll give you my uneducated, spectator-from-the-sideline view,” he said. “Things like stablecoins, things like on-ramp, things that are convertible back into fiat currency, are absolutely going to play a [role].”
But he said that, in countries that have robust know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering laws, he doesn’t see the value of “an alternative currency.”
“If you are in other parts of the world, maybe an alternative currency has more [value],” he concluded.
Bessent, Warsh, and Rowan did not immediately return a request for comment on each candidate’s stance on crypto.
Ben Weiss is DL News’ Dubai Correspondent. Got a tip? Email at bweiss@dlnews.com.