Scott Bessent knows how to throw a punch to keep the global economy afloat

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is at least 6 feet, four inches tall and, at age 63, technically only a few years from retirement age. But next to Art Laffer, the octogenarian free-market economist who clocks in at five-and-a-half feet, Bessent looks like a colossus.

This, of course, is the joke that a dozen speakers in a row cannot help but make to a packed audience spilling out of the party at the Treasury building. The crowd has congregated at 1500 Pennsylvania Ave. NW to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the eponymously named Laffer curve. But as much as the party is a celebration of Laffer’s legendary discovery, it is a promise of a passing of the torch. For as much as President Donald Trump has embraced more heterodox economics in his understanding of trade deals as the art