Opinion|Wall Street Loved Scott Bessent and Kevin Warsh. Not Anymore.

Sure, maybe everyone else in the Trump administration arrived via clown car — loyalists, quacks and quislings, plucked from a Fox News green room or President Trump’s crack legal team. But at least two of Mr. Trump’s top economic appointees were supposed to be “serious people.” After all, competent financial stewardship is pretty important for the domestic economy, the global payments system and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Mr. Trump realized the leaders of these federal institutions needed to be people the markets trust.

For a while, they were. Even amid trade wars, actual hot wars and threats to rule of law, markets seemed to be holding up. Thriving, even. Now Wall Street and the world’s investors appear to be finally losing faith in our economic leadership. What began as a few errant jitters seem to be approaching a full-blown credibility crisis for the Treasury, and if we’re extremely unlucky, perhaps the Fed as well.

Of all Mr. Trump’s appointees, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh have among the most impressive C.V.s. Both worked on Wall Street, as protégés of the legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller. Both lectured at elite schools (Yale and Stanford, respectively). While temperamentally quite different — Mr. Bessent is a hothead who occasionally threatens fisticuffs; Mr. Warsh is almost preternaturally polished and cool — they both spent years earning Mr. Trump’s trust.

Wall Street and political elites also vouched for both Mr. Bessent and Mr. Warsh. They assured U.S. senators that these men were competent, small-c conservatives — that they’d protect the integrity of the institutions that financial markets rely on to function properly.

Within days of Mr. Bessent’s confirmation, at least, it was obvious this was a misjudgment. One of his earliest actions as secretary was giving DOGE access to the sensitive Treasury payments system, which disburses some $6 trillion in payments annually. This was supposedly to investigate “fraud,” but it also was an attempt to help the Trump administration unilaterally freeze payments required by Congress. (A federal judge restricted DOGE’s access before this happened.)

Soon after, Mr. Bessent also allowed the I.R.S. to share confidential tax data with immigration enforcement — undermining decades of work to convince immigrants that if they paid their taxes honestly, the payments wouldn’t be weaponized against them. (Federal judges have blocked that, too.)