Trump to tap Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs partner, for treasury secretary

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

Mnuchin, a Yale graduate, is now chairman and co-chief executive officer of Dune Capital Management, a hedge fund.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of MA on November 15 assailed Trump for what she called a slew of “special interests, Wall Street elites and insiders” joining the White House transition team. As part of the deal, the government agreed to absorb some of the potential losses. The bank – later renamed OneWest – received $900 million in federal bailout money. He may also face questions about some of the practices at the bank, which later admitted to regulators that it failed to follow protocol when it foreclosed on homeowners struggling with risky mortgages.

Whether objections over his time at Goldman and his role at OneWest will amount to much is unclear.

“We’re making sure that all those conflicts are taken care of”, Priebus said. “Obviously there is an important concern of protecting depositors”, Mnuchin said in a July interview with CNBC.

“It was a disaster dealing with those people”, Rex Shaffer says. We talked about sports and we had a good time. He counted 33 OneWest employees, in all, and each one would give him “a different story”.

Like President Obama said repeatedly on the campaign trail, “If a guy’s spent 70 years on this earth showing no regard for working people, there’s no record that he’s supported the minimum wage or supported collective bargaining, invested in poor communities, and then suddenly he’s going to be the champion of working people?” That was on February 17, 2011. And while we have little information about how skillful he’d be at running the Treasury Department bureaucracy, the information we do have suggests he’s hardly an edgy outsider ready to shake things up.

President-elect Trump has picked Elaine Chao as Transportation secretary. After the elegant meal, the former MA governor – once a vocal critic – praised Trump for succeeding where he had failed, saying the president-elect offers a “message of inclusion and bringing people together”.

Although Mnuchin has a reputation for being a behind-the-scenes player in Hollywood, he does appear on screen in the 2016 film “Rules Don’t Apply”, according to the IMDB movie database.

Mnuchin did not immediately return a request for comment.

As a vocal Trump supporter before the election, Ross cited the need for a “more radical, new approach to government” that would help middle class and lower middle class Americans.

Trump’s economic plans, expected to cost anywhere from $2.6 trillion to $5.9 trillion, are ambitious and include overhauling the tax code, revamping Dodd Frank, addressing China’s manipulation of its currency, renegotiating trade deals and making massive investments in USA infrastructure. The job carries expansive responsibility, including managing the federal debt and overseeing Wall Street and the financial markets. He said he would not let it get away with murder and that it had caused tremendous problems.

Goldman Sachs is a family affair.

After leaving the bank, Mnuchin worked for storied billionaire investor George Soros – a well-known Democratic donor. NPR’s John Ydstie reports. And more recently, he’s headed a privately owned hedge fund, Dune Capital Management. Last April, he became Trump’s chief fundraiser, and now he’s a member of the president-elect’s transition team. Among its most notable investments was the purchase of IndyMac from the FDIC during the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. Another bank, CIT, acquired OneWest previous year for $3.4 billion, roughly double the original sale price.

KEVIN STEIN: In essence, what they did is they bought a foreclosure machine. The more we know about these people, the better equipped we will be to fight them at every turn. Well, that was on February 17, 2011.