Wall Street Journal vs. Treasury Secretary Bessent Erupts as Pre-Election Blood Feud

Too bad the Ultimate Fighting Championship stage has been taken down from the White House lawn, because if it were still there, it’d provide a venue for what is emerging as one of the bitterest and most consequential political and economic fights in the run-up to the midterm elections: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent versus the Wall Street Journal, and in particular the Journal’s Federal Reserve reporter and "chief economic correspondent," Nick Timiraos.

Bessent targeted Timiraos in a social media post in August that has amassed nearly 4 million views. "One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the WSJ’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed," Bessent wrote.

The feud got even hotter this week, with the Journal publishing a breathless front-page news article on October 7 under four bylines with the not exactly earthshattering scoop that Bessent "can excoriate staff when he is frustrated"—as if no one in the Wall Street Journal newsroom, or Washington Bureau, or elsewhere in the media empire controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, has ever expressed frustration in direct terms at a staffer. Buried in the article is the disclosure that "the Treasury Department blocked a Journal reporter from attending a press conference" and "the department also revoked the credentials of reporters from the Journal … to cover a G-20 finance ministers summit in North Carolina."

A counselor to the Treasury Secretary, David Zervos, snapped back October 8 with a social media post targeting Timiraos and the Wall Street Journal’s "chief economic commentator," Greg Ip. Zervos mocked them: "the administration could design a program to give kids more nutritious school lunches, and folks like @NickTimiraos and @greg_ip would complain about how it raises the risk of global warming or violates their cherished DEI principles."

It’s more than merely a run-of-the-mill fight between a presidential administration and the press corps. It has implications for monetary policy and the midterm elections. The Journal news pages, under bylines like Timiraos and Ip, have been hyping a Trump-administration-induced financial catastrophe since he was elected, with headlines like "Trump’s Trade Offensive Threatens America’s Financial Primacy" (Timiraos, April 20, 2025) or "The Ditch-America Trade Now Has Its Own Acronym: ABUSA" (May 18, 2025). Yet the U.S. economy is showing remarkable strength. Stock market indexes have broken records, real median household income set a record, and the poverty rate is at a historic low. Unemployment is low. The biggest risk may be that the Fed sets off what Apollo’s Torsten Slok calls a "higher-rates, higher-rent doom loop," where the Fed winds up fighting what someone described to me as "an inflationary shadow of its own creation."

Unlike Bessent, who ran a hedge fund, or Zervos, who was chief market strategist at Jeffries, the reporters don’t get paid based on the accuracy or inaccuracy of their calls. One thing some people did pay the Wall Street Journal or Dow Jones for is the "spoon-fed," or quasi-official information about coming Fed rate decisions. With the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, a Bessent ally, cutting that flow of information as part of a new communications strategy that Timiraos is complaining about (in a reply to me on social media), the Wall Street Journal is suddenly less valuable than it was before.

In 2025 Zervos was quoted as saying that then-Fed chair Jay Powell was not independent but rather "operating politically from the left. Or, let’s put it this way, from the anti-Trump side." That was back when the Timiraos types were echoing Powell about the grave threats supposedly posed by Trump to the Fed’s supposed independence. The issue isn’t exactly that the reporters are stenographers but whose talk they are transcribing.

The Journal is hardly the only paper that’s been overly alarmist—Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is with CNBC and the New York Times, brought out a book called 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation, that published in October (get it?) 2025. The S&P 500 Index is up about 15 percent since then, notwithstanding the Iran War’s effect on petroleum prices and the various Trump tariffs that so many predicted would be a Smoot-Hawley do-over.

Timiraos and the Treasury Department did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The Murdoch family is competitive. Rather than cheering an incremental turn by CBS News toward the ideological center, the Journal has been targeting the Ellison family that is amassing, with Skydance, a potential Fox competitor. One recent Journal front-page story dwelled on the fact that Larry Ellison, 82, is married to his "sixth wife," China-born Jolin Ellison, 35. Another Journal article reported that Larry Ellison had purchased eight homes in Boynton Beach, Fla. for his household staff, "including tutors for some of the five children he shares with his sixth wife, Jolin Ellison."

Bessent at the moment seems to be getting Ellison-like coverage from the Wall Street Journal. Chalk it up to access issues or partisanship, but whatever the reasons, to do well in next month’s midterm elections President Trump will have to go around the Wall Street Journal newsroom and find alternative ways—X, paid commercials—to reach Americans. Or he can hope the voters just check, and trust, their own paystubs and retirement account statements more frequently than they do the newspapers.

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