How Scott Bessent Enables Oligarchy

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-10-07-how-scott-bessent-enables-oligarchy/



After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the government began cracking down on hidden transfers of wealth. The purpose was to prevent money laundering that might finance terrorism. Some of this was codified in the USA PATRIOT Act. After the financial collapse of 2008, other safeguards were added. All this strengthened the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), with the side benefit of helping regulatory agencies track down other uses of concealed wealth, whether or not they are related to national security.

But in the ensuing quarter-century, extreme wealth became ever more concentrated, and oligarchs became ever more crafty at hiding the true ownership of wealth through trusts and corporate forms that are utterly opaque to financial regulators, the IRS, and the national-security establishment, much less the public. The incorporation laws of four states, led by Delaware and increasingly crypto-friendly Wyoming, make it possible to create a corporation without disclosing in any way its true beneficial owners.

As national-security concerns as well as deepening financial abuses came to the fore again, reformers began pushing back. Their signal achievement was a law enacted in 2020 called the Corporate Transparency Act, which requires the disclosure of the beneficial ownership of all shell corporations and trusts. The CTA required business entities to report details about their beneficial owners—individuals who own 25 percent or more of the entity or who exercise substantial control.

The law was passed with wide bipartisan support in the closing days of the first Trump administration. It was tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 and passed over Trump’s veto, the only override during his entire administration. The passage caught the oligarchy off guard. The incoming Biden administration issued draft regulations in early 2021. Because of the sheer complexity of all the ways that wealth is hidden, plus litigation against the CTA, it took until the closing days of the administration for final regulations to be issued, specifying that all disclosures had to be made by January 1, 2025. At last, the true ownership of hidden oligarchic wealth would have to be disclosed. Law firms began issuing guidance to their clients on compliance with required disclosures.

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[CentralMass]

1. He's a sphincter.