President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin—a man described as “the anti-populist from Hell”—is his pick for Treasury secretary.
His appointment, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), “should send shivers down the spine of every American who got hit hard by the financial crisis.” Mnuchin, she added, “is the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis—he managed to participate in all the worst practices on Wall Street.”
Warren and other critics of his appointment say Mnuchin’s background—including running a bank described as “a foreclosure machine”—is further evidence that Trump has no intention of fulfilling his campaign promise to “drain the swamp” of corporate lobbyists and Wall Street executives.
“This isn’t draining the swamp—it’s stocking it with alligators,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “Mnuchin’s Wall Street pedigree presents a stark contrast with the populist themes Mr. Trump struck in his campaign, railing against big banks and vowing to close tax loopholes that benefit hedge funds.”
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) minced no words in its reaction, calling Mnuchin “a self-dealing Wall Street tool,” while journalist and The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald said on Twitter that Mnuchin is “basically the cartoon-villain personification of everything alt-right rails against and Trump put him in charge of Treasury.”
The son of a Goldman partner, Mnuchin spent 17 years at the bank, has funded Hollywood films including American Sniper, profited millions off the Bernie Madoff scheme, and, as NPR reports,
Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac on the condition that the FDIC agree to pay future losses above a certain threshold. They renamed the bank OneWest Bank and, after running it for six years, they sold it last year for a profit, estimated at close to $1.5 billion.
Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, a housing advocacy group, says that profit was made on the backs of suffering California homeowners. “In essence what they did is they bought a foreclosure machine,” he says.
According to the coalition, OneWest foreclosed on more than 36,000 homeowners under Mnuchin. During that time, the FDIC made payments to OneWest totaling more $1 billion. Those payments went to the “billionaire investors of OneWest Bank,” says Stein, “to cover the cost of foreclosing on working-class, everyday, American folks,” many of whom lived in California.
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