Donald Trump to name ex-banker Steven Mnuchin new treasury secretary

US President-elect Donald Trump will name campaign loyalist and former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as his Treasury secretary, multiple media reports said today.

US President-elect Donald Trump, left, dines with Mitt Romny, right, at Jean-Georges restaurant at Trump International Hotel and Tower in NY on Tuesday.

“Steve Mnuchin is a world-class financier, banker and businessman, and has played a key role in developing our plan to build a dynamic, booming economy that will create millions of jobs”, Trump said. Marr pointed out that this assertion “is completely at odds with the tax plan that Trump announced during the campaign”. But GOP officials have raised no such concerns about Trump’s picks.

Wilbur Ross, a billionaire who has made a career of resurrecting dying companies, confirmed in the same interview that he is Trump’s choice for commerce secretary, the face of American business around the world.

The more credible accusation against Trump is not that he is anti-Semitic, but that he and his campaign have trafficked in language and conspiracy theories that would immediately be understood by anti-Semites as signaling Jewish villainy – and galvanize them to back the campaign. And he selected another veteran Republican, Elaine Chao (chow), a former labor secretary, to lead the Department of Transportation.

At the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Chuck Marr was quick to rebut a statement by Mnuchin on CNBC this morning regarding tax policy, which also comes under the purview of the Treasury Secretary. If approved by the Senate, he would become the third Goldman Sachs alumnus to serve in the post after Henry R. Paulson (George W. Bush) and Robert E. Rubin (Bill Clinton).

– Goldman Sachs: friend or foe?

Mnuchin (pronounced mah-NEW-chin) joined Trump’s whirlwind campaign in May as finance chairman, despite the fact that he had never worked in politics and that he had donated to Democrats in the past.

Mnuchin’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was also at Goldman before becoming an art dealer, founding the Mnuchin Gallery in NY.

After leaving Goldman in 2002, he founded Dune Capital Management, a hedge fund named after the dunes near his beach house in the Hamptons.

Mnuchin was part of a group that bought the failed California mortgage lender IndyMac from the government in 2009. In a letter to members of Congress, AFR charged that H.R. 6392, the “Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2016”, would increase the likelihood of bank failures by loosening financial regulations on financial institutions that have assets of more than $50 billion but are not among the eight largest US banks.

In 2014, OneWest was sold to financial services firm CIT Group for $3.4 billion.

This month, two housing groups filed a complaint asking the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate complaints that OneWest engaged in discriminatory “redlining” practices against black and Latino communities.

Evacuees forced from their homes and businesses by rapidly spreading wildfires in East Tennessee Monday night are getting their first look at the damage left behind. “Obviously there is an important concern of protecting depositors”, Mnuchin said in a July interview with CNBC. “We didn’t even know it – didn’t have the faintest idea”, Rex Shaffer says. In addition, it would be his job to sell the new administration’s economic program to Congress. He would also lead an agency tasked with implementing global economic sanctions. He was an early supporter of Mr Trump’s, and his selection has been described as an olive branch to the financial sector.

Trump’s remaining major picks – Reince Priebus for chief of staff, Nikki Haley for United Nations ambassador, Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary, Steven Mnuchin for treasury secretary, and Elaine Chao for transportation secretary – don’t stand out as especially polarizing choices.

When Trump’s transition team was stocked with lobbyists and former lobbyists, Pence took over as chairman and instituted a policy that anyone working on the transition would have to cut ties with lobbying in the policy arena they were working on for the administration.

Wildfires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee and surrounding areas spread by “hurricane force” wind and dry brush, causing thousands to evacuate their burning homes on November 29, 2016. The 2010 law aimed to prevent future crises similar to those of 2008-09 with an overhaul of USA financial regulation.

Under Mnuchin, the bank more than doubled its branches and increased its assets.