US treasury department demands retraction of story on increased oversight of

The US treasury department demanded on Friday that the Financial Times (FT) retract a report on treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s views on the Federal Reserve, accusing the newspaper of publishing “false claims” in a formal complaint that was escalated to the news outlet’s parent company, Nikkei Inc. The email from treasury officials, addressed to senior editors at the FT and Nikkei, disputed multiple claims in the story and criticized the headline as misrepresenting the underlying reporting.

The FT reported on 26 March that Bessent had discussed increasing oversight of the Federal Reserve in a way that resembled the Bank of England, including through regular communication between its governor and Britain’s chancellor over inflation targets. Treasury officials denied that Bessent had endorsed such views or discussed adopting similar practices in Washington.

They also took issue with the headline, which said Bessent had “praised” the Bank of England model for tighter oversight even though that did not appear in the text of the story. “The Secretary has never made any of the above statements in public or private,” the acting assistant secretary for public affairs, Elliott Hulse, wrote in the email, which was forwarded to the Guardian by a person directly familiar with the matter on the condition of anonymity.

“At no time has the secretary ‘discussed tightening the US Treasury’s oversight of the Federal Reserve by adopting elements of the Bank of England’s model in a step that would shake up the central bank’s relationship with government,’” the email said. “At no time has the secretary indicated, implied, or asserted that he ‘could support the UK system in which the BoE governor corresponds regularly with the chancellor about the central bank’s inflation target,’” it added.

The complaint marked the latest effort by the US treasury to discredit the FT report. On Thursday, Bessent posted his own denials on social media, writing in part: “In short, FT has literally manufactured an entirely fake policy position for me and the Administration.” Treasury officials stopped short of issuing a legal threat, but cited provisions in the editors code of practice established by the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organization, or Ipso, which requires publications to avoid misleading or distorted information.