Trump's Treasury Secretary Pick Is Everything Wall Street Could Have Hoped For

When treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, it'll be at a moment of near unmitigated glee for Wall Street.

After all, bank stocks are on a rocket ride, setting records heading into what analysts think will be a good earnings season. CEOs of some of the biggest financial behemoths are singing sweet tunes about growth and opportunity in 2017.

Why such happy days in the financial district? Well, America's banking titans seem to believe they'll get everything they want out of a Donald Trump administration.

And they may be right.

Yes, on the campaign trail Trump railed against the influence of shady financial elites, even singling out Goldman Sachs as having "total control" over his political opponents. He warned of a nefarious nexus of "international banks" and "global financial powers" set to overthrow U.S. sovereignty. And he accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – she of the secret Goldman Sachs speeches – of being in hock to megabanks and at the center of the conspiracy.

But while Clinton may have spoken to Goldman Sachs, Trump is all set to let Goldman Sachs speak for him. Thus far, he has made half a dozen high-profile nominations from among the Goldman ranks: The aforementioned Mnuchin, White House strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Securities and Exchange Commission head John Clayton, and advisers Anthony Scaramucci and Dina Powell are all alumni.

So much for Trump the populist hero, eh?

Truth be told, though, Trump's populism has always been more faux than serious. Even as he was railing against the malignant influence of Wall Street during his campaign rallies, he was promising to return the regulatory state to the status quo from before the financial crisis. His transition team has pledged to "dismantle Dodd-Frank," the 2010 financial reform law signed by President Barack Obama. And Republicans in Congress have for years said that they'll rein in Obama regulators who were just too tough on the poor, overburdened banks.

To receive those sort of legislative and regulatory gifts, big banks are willing to be rhetorical punching bags come campaign time.

Mnuchin, who was finance chairman of Trump's campaign, perhaps most symbolizes this embrace of Wall Street. "We have actually been bankers," he says, while explaining that the administration wants to "strip back parts of Dodd-Frank," a law which, while imperfect, has definitely reduced the threat the financial sector poses to the wider economy.

Indeed, Mnuchin has been a banker, and according to the available evidence, one dogged in his pursuit of chucking people out of their homes during the Great Recession. As David Dayen noted in the New Republic, Mnuchin oversaw the bank OneWest, which "routinely jumped to foreclosure rather than pursue options to keep borrowers in their homes; used fabricated and 'robo-signed' documents to secure the evictions; and had a particular talent for dispossessing the homes of senior citizens and people of color."

"After years peddling the kind of dangerous mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the economy, Mnuchin swooped in after the crash to take a second bite out of families by aggressively – and sometimes illegally – foreclosing on their homes," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., perhaps Wall Street's fiercest critic on Capitol Hill, in a December statement.

Democrats can't block Mnuchin's confirmation alone, of course, because they (rightfully) blew up the filibuster for executive appointments. But they can make clear what a vote for Mnuchin means: License to put someone who enabled some of the worst Wall Street practices during and after the financial crisis in charge of the Treasury. With him overseeing the department, we'll all be partying like it's 2007.

But perhaps this is a sadly appropriate outcome. After all, the big con from the beginning of the Trump campaign has been that he is actually interested in protecting working people from rapacious corporations or moneyed influences. Somehow, a (maybe) billionaire who left a string of stiffed contractors and defrauded students in his wake convinced a healthy minority of American voters that he was on their side and against "the establishment," which was enough to tip him into an Electoral College victory.

His choice of Mnuchin, though, alongside his professed desire to let Wall Street return to the bad old pre-crisis days, shows where his loyalties lie: With the money, just like they always do. And big banks will love him for it.

-Pat Garofalo


My take: Evidently Trump thinks the only way to lure corporations into returning to the U.S. is to give them the keys to everything, to model the nation after their corporate will and desire. Can you say temporary fix or what? Either Trump really believes this is the only way or he is in fact an extremist right-wing hack on a dead end run wasting our time or both. If it is the former then he surely must know this can only be temporary. Surely the corporations know. The only other option? The suspension of our Constitution and democratic republic or the effectual suspension of our republic by fully instituting the control of our congress by big money. They are getting more confident using the latter with each passing day but the question of just how confident is what each and every citizen should be concerned about.