Trump Picks Former Banker Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary

Mr Trump’s choice as deputy at the Commerce Department, Todd Ricketts, is the son of a billionaire and the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball club and Steven Mnuchin, who Mr Trump hopes will be his Treasury Secretary, is a former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge fund executive and Hollywood financier.

Housing groups in California are ringing alarm bells over President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, alleging that as chairman and CEO of Pasadena-based OneWest Bank, Steve Mnuchin presided over a bank that discriminated against minorities and foreclosed on tens of thousands of Californians. Trump also picked billionaire investor Wilbur Ross to serve as secretary of commerce. Elizabeth Warren of MA has called Mnuchin the “Forrest Gump of the financial crisis” due to his uncanny knack for being at the center of all the worst Wall Street abuses.

In a campaign commercial that ran just before the election, Donald J. Trump’s voice boomed over a series of Wall Street images.

The Washington Post reports that when George W. Bush took over the White House in 2001, he entered with an administration whose inflation-adjusted net worth was around $250 million, an amount equaling one-tenth of the net worth of the president-elect’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

According to Politico, OneWest, a bank Mnuchin created in the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial collapse, once foreclosed on an elderly woman over a 27-cent payment error. And even if he sells off his Dune Capital holdings to avoid a glaring conflict of interest, his deep ties to Wall Street could prove impossible to untangle. Indeed, Ross’s guidance salvaged Trump’s brand and property at a moment when both were going bust.

In addition to shackling financial institutions with lots of new regulations, Dodd-Frank steered Wall Street to change its hiring and pay practices.

On the campaign trail, Trump decried a political system he said was rigged against the working class and made a now-infamous promise to “drain the swamp” of establishment figures.

The gap between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his governing decisions is most striking regarding his emerging economic team.

The congressional plan, like Trump’s, would cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, but it would not do almost as much as Trump would to cut taxes for lower- and middle-income Americans.

And in an interview with CNN, Miller noted that Mnuchin and Ross had advised Trump during the campaign, helping him to narrow in on the disruptive trade policy proposals, for example, that he lambasted on the stump.

“Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class”, Mnuchin said.

By tapping Mnuchin for Treasury, Weissman says it’s obvious that we’ve been had. Asked about Mnuchin’s new prospective job, they sounded puzzled: “If he can’t run his own little bank, how can he handle a large thing for the United States?” Many economists think that will limit US growth to closer to the 2 percent range going forward. Among the leading contenders: millionaire businessman Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, and millionaire lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor.