Steven Mnuchin might have a shot at Treasury secretary, but his Wall
Street pedigree makes him the type Donald Trump fans love to hate.XX
Mnuchin was born into a level of privilege that makes Trump’s deluxe
childhood look ordinary. His grandfather, an attorney, co-founded a
yacht club in
the Hamptons, and his father, Robert, was a top Goldman Sachs trader who
later became an art dealer. Mnuchin followed his father to Yale, where he
lived in the old Taft Hotel with Eddie Lampert, now a billionaire
investor, and Sam Chalabi, whose uncle, Ahmad, later ran the Iraqi
National Congress.XX
He got summer jobs at Salomon Brothers before graduating from Yale in
1985. His bosses at the bank asked why they should bring him on.
“You’re just going to end up going to Goldman Sachs,” Mnuchin remembers
one telling him. “I said, ‘No, I really don’t want to go to Goldman Sachs.
I’m going to go do something different.’” He went to Goldman Sachs.
Heather deForest Crosby and Steven Terner Mnuchin were married last
evening by Cantor Ronald Broden at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.
(M 1999 - D 2014) (If you were wondering what the hell is Cipriani Wall
Street as I was - see photos here:
http://www.cipriani.com/events/?loc=ny-wall-street&type=photos
A cigar-smoking trader from Salomon, Michael Mortara, came to Goldman,
too. He became Mnuchin’s mentor, showing him how the firm could profit
from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s by buying the assets of
capsized banks on the cheap. Mnuchin left Goldman at the end of 2002 to
work
for two hedge funds, taking top jobs with his friend Lampert and George
Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and Clinton donor. In 2004, Mnuchin
founded his own hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, named for a spot
near his house in the Hamptons, and got hundreds of millions of dollars
from Soros. The firm invested in at least two Trump projects, a branded
condo in Waikiki and a Chicago skyscraper. Trump sued Dune and other
lenders
over the Chicago deal before settling.XX
Mnuchin helped put together a group of investors to buy the bank from
FDIC as part of a sweetheart deal. Mnuchin became CEO of the new
institution,
renamed OneWest. XX
*According to the Los Angeles Business Journal, “critics point out that
the deal is allowing OneWest’s owners to make billions of dollars in
profits while **
**costing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — and the banking industry
that funds it — more than $10 billion.”XX**
*
One theory bouncing between Manhattan and Beverly Hills holds that an
investor with so much Wall Street blood in his veins spotted the trade
of a lifetime.
In exchange for a few months of unpaid work, Mnuchin gets a shot at
joining President Trump’s cabinet. Goldman partners have wealth, and
movie producers
befriend stars, but the secretary of the Treasury gets his signature
stamped on cash.
Trump, who declined to be interviewed, has told donors Mnuchin would be
good at the job of stewarding the world’s biggest economy. Mnuchin
himself is
circumspect, and if you ask him about his motivations—getting him on the
phone between $50,000-a-plate dinners, or in his Manhattan office—he sounds
less like a political obsessive than an investor closing a deal he can’t
quite discuss. “This was a unique moment in time where there’s a unique
role for me,” he says.
“It’s a unique moment in time,” he says again.XX
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-31/steven-mnuchin-businessweekXX
and several other websites.