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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped his presidential campaign's national finance chairman, who is also a former Wall Street banker and film producer with no government experience, as his Treasury secretary, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
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According to Bloomber News:
"Before joining Trump, Mnuchin rose through the kind of elite institutions the president-elect spent his campaign vilifying. Mnuchin was tapped into Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, became a Goldman Sachs partner like his father before him, ran a hedge fund, worked with George Soros, funded Hollywood blockbusters and bought a failed bank, IndyMac, with billionaires including John Paulson. They renamed it OneWest, drew protests for foreclosing on U.S. borrowers, and ultimately generated considerable profits, selling the business last year to CIT Group Inc. for $3.4 billion."
Steven Mnuchin, a former partner for Goldman Sachs for 17 years, will become the third Goldman Sachs executive to fill the post after Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration and Henry Paulson with George W. Bush.
Mnuchin's appointment offers, on the one hand, a message of calm to Wall Street that one of their kind will be in charged of Treasury, but on the other it contradicts his populist, and at times conspiratorial campaign rhetoric accusing Wall Street and international bankers, and specifically Goldman Sachs, of meeting in secret in oder to rig the global economy in order to fleece workers and fill their own pockets.
Mnuchin's left Goldman in 2002 to start his own hedge fund Dune Capital Management.
With Dune he has invested in movies produced by Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox and Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros, including blockbusters "Avatar," "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Suicide Squad.”
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The Treasury Secretary sets policy for government borrowing and debts, assisting in the overhaul of the tax code and preparing financial sanctions against other countries.
Trump has also selected Elaine Chao to head the Department of Transportation. She was secretary of Labor during the George W. Bush administration, but her integration into the cabinet is surely not only because of her experience, but also because she is the wife of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, something that will be useful for Trump's massive infrastructure program.
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