Warren blasts Trump’s Cabinet appointments

Goldman Sachs’ stock price jumped to levels not seen since before the financial crash, thanks to President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement of his intended Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman exec and hedge fund manager. Trump also plans to nominate billionaire investor Wilbur Ross as Commerce secretary, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel deliberations.

On trade, Mnuchin and Ross sounded a somewhat softer note than Trump did on the campaign trail.

She questioned how the president-elect wants to run his administration when asked if there was a chance for common ground to be found between her and a Trump administration on specific issues.

So far, businesses are responding favorably to the president-elect.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders call the nomination of Steve Mnuchin (pictured) for treasury secretary the height of hypocracy. Mnuchin in 2009 led a group of wealthy investors – including Soros and Michael Dell – who bought failed Pasadena mortgage lender IndyMac and turned it into OneWest Bank.

Trump claimed many times during his campaign and since the election that he will “drain the swamp”, meaning he will remove career politicians, lobbyists and people with ties to financial institutions from positions of power.

“During the campaign, Donald Trump told the American people that he was going to change Washington by taking on Wall Street”, Warren and Sanders said in a joint statement.

“Let me first say what I’ve really been focused on is being a regional banker for the last eight years and I know what it takes to make sure that we can make loans to small and mid-market companies”, Mnuchin said.

Mnuchin said his top priorities would be to hasten economic growth and job creation through tax cuts and a loosening of post-crisis financial regulations.

“That’s the person who’s going to be the chief economic officer of the United States”, she said. If confirmed, Mnuchin would be placed at the forefront of major Trump plans such as an ambitious overhaul of the tax code and a $1 trillion infrastructure spending blitz. Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration and Henry Paulson in the George W. Bush administration also worked at the Wall Street powerhouse.

“Blue-collar billionaire” Donald Trump may tap multimillionaire Mitt Romney for secretary of state, but Romney – whose net worth is about $250 million – would be somewhere in the middle of Trump’s Cabinet picks, wealth-wise. Overnight, there was word that he had cut a deal with the air conditioner maker Carrier to keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana. During the campaign, Mr. Trump pledged that if elected, he would force Carrier to reconsider the move and possibly slap a 35 percent tariff on products it ships back into the U.S.