“Well, Martha, in case you don’t know, I’m actually a soybean farmer. So, I have felt this pain too.” — Scott Bessent

Scott Bessent and Harry Stine are the only soybean farmers, current or former, I can name.

Technically, that means the average net worth of soybean farmers I know is over $5 billion. Here’s the math on that: Bessent’s worth roughly $500 million, Stine around $10 billion and $10.5 billion divided by two is $5.25 billion.

That said, my guess is that if you add up the net worth of all American soybean farmers and divide by the sample size, you won’t get $5.25 billion. The median net worth of American soybean farmers is surely far lower than the mean and the median for small soybean farmers likely doesn’t cover Bessent’s expenses for a week, particularly if you don’t count off-farm income which, according to the USDA, accounts for “the majority” of small family farm household earnings.

So, when Bessent told Martha Raddatz on October 26 that, as a farmer himself, he empathizes with growers hurt by Donald Trump’s tariffs and associated trade friction with Beijing, the result was ridicule from netizens who turned Scott Bessent, soybean farmer, into a series of genuinely funny memes, assisted by AI image generators.

Early this month, during an interview with Margaret Brennan, Bessent said he divested from his farmland holdings which summed to thousands of acres in North Dakota. Finally. He finally divested. Bessent was required to divest those assets within three months of taking office, but he drug his feet claiming the land was “illiquid and not readily marketable.”

News of the divestiture was greeted with more sarcasm. “Scott Bessent Is No Longer A Soybean Farmer,” USA Today dryly remarked. “Boy, you just hate to see a farmer go out of business,” a real farmer in Nebraska quipped, on social media.

The whole episode proved that in addition to being improbably richer than Donald Trump’s first Treasury Secretary, Bessent’s also more oblivious to absurd optics than Steve Mnuchin, also improbable considering Louise Linton’s infamous Cruella de Vil moment at the engraving bureau belongs next to Jake Paul’s jet flex on any list of ridiculously distasteful wealth displays.

Bessent’s a lot of things, but one of them isn’t attuned to the daily struggle of the average American farmer. Nor, as he suggested in an interview with a podcast run by Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, does Bessent “understand” the American people’s pain at a time when households are still reeling from the across-the-board upward price reset witnessed in the aftermath of the pandemic and around the onset of the war in Ukraine.

Given that someone like Bessent can’t possibly empathize with everyday people even if he’s serious about trying, you have to wonder if he’s the right guy for the job when it comes to tipping a possible rethink of the Fed’s price stability mandate.

By now, it’s not exactly a secret that the Fed’s commitment to the 2% YoY inflation target isn’t as assiduously uncompromising as the Committee would have you believe. After all, they haven’t hit that target in years, and their forecast for a time table on restoring PCE inflation to 2% on a sustainable basis keeps getting pushed into the future in the quarterly projections.

So, no one would be surprised if the Fed traded the target for a range, particularly considering the (extraordinarily ill-timed) adoption of so-called “flexible average inflation targeting” in 2020, when Jerome Powell unveiled a strategy for tolerating higher inflation in the interest of making up for historical undershoots. (Mission accomplished!)

Powell abandoned FAIT at this year’s Jackson Hole symposium, but the idea of it — countenancing deviations from the target — nods to the desirability of a more flexible approach to price stability considering the (inherent) impossibility of managing inflation around a point-specific goal.

During the interview with Palihapitiya’s podcast, Bessent said there’s “a very robust conversation” to be had around a new approach to price stability maintenance that entails the Fed managing inflation in a range between 1.5% and 2.5% or even 1% to 3%.

Bessent was right to call the notion of “decimal-point certainty” for inflation “just absurd.” It’s not even possible to estimate inflation with decimal-point certainty, let alone manage it to meet a target that specific.

But officially switching to a range, especially one that tolerates inflation up to a full point above the current target, is perilous at a time when the Fed hasn’t yet succeeded in bringing price growth back down to the existing target.

Bessent acknowledged as much. The Fed can’t make the switch now because that’d suggest to the public that policymakers are inclined to “fudge upward” when they can’t hit the target, he said.

And yet, it’s pretty clear where this is going. Bessent called last week’s CPI report — which was roundly lampooned not just by economists, but by traders and the general investing public for being, to use Scott’s word, “fudged” — “pretty accurate” and said 2% inflation’s “in sight.”

The takeaway: If and when Trump’s BLS and BEA suggest core CPI and headline PCE price growth are near enough to 2% for Kevin’s (Hassett or Warsh) Fed to call the job done, the administration will attempt to shift the price stability mandate such that it targets a range, not a specific number.

Thereafter, you can be sure actual inflation will habitually run nearer the top-end of the range than the lower-end, at least outside of recession. Even if the official, state-produced data suggests otherwise.