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➚ BUY: Bessent. Hedge funder John Paulson dropped out of the running for Treasury Secretary Tuesday, leaving former Soros investor Scott Bessent as the odds-on favorite. Online betting markets — yes, they’re still here doing their thing — agree.

➘ SELL: Buffett. The billionaire has sold down his biggest stock positions, Apple and Bank of America, and paused buybacks, a caution that’s making some stock-market investors uneasy.

SoftBank finds its feet… Neom CEO abruptly leaves… Schwarzman’s Trump gamble pays off… Elliott lays its biggest bet… Netflix with ads is popular… Don Jr., venture capitalist... How Microsoft went nuclear...

Makan Delrahim, a top antitrust cop in Donald Trump’s first administration, has talked to the transition team in recent weeks about running the Federal Trade Commission, people familiar with the matter said.

It’s a lightning-rod position, elevated by current FTC Chair Lina Khan’s expansive view of anti-competitive behavior and willingness to take companies to court. Trump’s supporters in the business community want license to merge, while Vice President-elect JD Vance represents a populist wing of the party that’s as skeptical as progressives are of corporate consolidation.

Delrahim defied easy classification during his time running the competition division of Trump’s Justice Department, suing to block some big deals but letting others through and bringing the first monopoly case against Google in 2020. But he may not be easily coaxed from a corporate-law job in California. He declined to comment through a spokesman.

What’s at stake: Trump’s FTC will have to decide whether to pursue ongoing monopoly cases against Amazon and Meta or appeal a ruling that overturned the agency’s ban on non-compete clauses in employee contracts. Keep an eye on legislative efforts to abolish the FTC entirely and roll its oversight into the antitrust department Delrahim once ran at DOJ, an idea House Speaker Mike Johnson has supported.

Goldman Sachs’ John F.W. Rogers, who previously served as an informal adviser to then-First Lady Melania Trump, will help staff up the East Wing, Semafor scooped Monday.

Jay Clayton, Trump’s former Securities and Exchange Commission chair who is under consideration for a number of jobs this time around, abruptly canceled a speech for Wednesday morning in New York. “No news,” he told Politico.

Trump’s promise to replace SEC Chair Gary Gensler on his first day got such thunderous applause at a bitcoin convention in July that he repeated it a few times for effect. His short list is a mix of Wall Street lawyers and SEC veterans, some of whom have embraced crypto.

Bob Stebbins, the agency’s general counsel during Trump’s first term, now in private practice, is a leading candidate with the private backing of Clayton, people familiar with the process said. Stebbins has criticized Gensler’s “hostile approach” to crypto, which he wrote has put the US behind Asia and Europe in developing digital assets.

Also in the mix are Dan Gallagher, a Republican SEC commissioner under Barack Obama who is now at Robinhood, which offers crypto to its trading customers; Paul Atkins, a George W. Bush appointee to the agency; and Wall Street lawyer Rich Farley, people familiar with the matter said. The Washington Post adds the two sitting Republican commissioners to that list.

What’s at stake: Crypto aside, the next SEC chief inherits an agency struggling to digest Gensler’s regulatory binge, which tackled climate change and private investment funds with little success. They will also face newfangled products in private markets and an explosion in PE fundraising among retail investors.

Data showing that Federal Reserve employees overwhelmingly donate to Democratic causes is making its way around Wall Street this week. It was originally posted on X by a former Fed trader, signal-boosted by blue checks, and verified here by Semafor. (It’s worth noting that most Fed employees live in cities, which lean left.)

When inevitably brought to Trump’s attention — among its amplifiers are some MAGA faithful — the data will provide more fodder for his efforts to exert control over the central bank or even fire its leader, Jay Powell. Elon Musk, for now a minister without a portfolio in Trump world, has posted in support of efforts to erode the Fed’s independence. Powell, for his part, has said he won’t go and that removing him before his term expires in 2026 is illegal.

Political pressure on the Fed hasn’t only come from Republicans. Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren were calling for rate cuts earlier this year to make mortgages cheaper. A landmark study in 1993 by future US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and decorated Italian economist Alberto Alesina found that countries with independent central banks had lower inflation.

Most economists agree that Trump’s plans of tax cuts, tariffs, and mass deportations of undocumented workers would slow the economy, but the scale and speed remains a big unknown for investors.

Taxes will be a fight in Congress, where control of the House of Representatives is still pending, on the heels of some of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expiring in 2025. Tariffs may encourage more US manufacturing, but building domestic factories and retraining workers takes time.

“The US economy is a big tanker,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, an arm of the consulting giant, told Semafor. “Even with big policy changes, it just doesn’t turn that quickly.”

Daco expects the cumulative effect of Trump’s preferred set of taxes, tariffs, and immigration curbs would shave 0.45 percentage points off an expected annual growth rate of around 2%.

And as with his first term, corporate executives will have to muddle through the question of whether to take Trump literally or seriously. Daco’s advice: “Refamiliarize yourself with the idea that scenarios are your friend.”

Bursting your bubble: Both the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the right-leaning American Action Forum say that Trump’s proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% across the board, and 60% on Chinese goods, would cost the average family $3,900 a year.

Donald Trump’s victory reflects how legacy media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever, Semafor’s Max Tani wrote, after Democratic Sen. John Fetterman told him why he chose to appear on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. “Critical political media coverage simply did not resonate with a large swath of the electorate,” Tani wrote.