Will Steve Mnuchin Defend American Prosperity as Treasury Secretary?

Failure to Disclose Nearly $100 Million In Assets Tells Us He Won’t

Steve Mnuchin will likely be the United States’ next Treasury Secretary – perhaps by Monday evening. But will he have your back?

The signs are not encouraging. Selected by President Trump to oversee management of the nation’s financial system, Mnuchin has shown an inability to keep up with his own finances. His first act as Treasury Secretary-designate was omitting from disclosure forms required by the Senate nearly $100 million dollars of his assets and his work as a director of an investment fund located in an offshore tax haven.

Mnuchin seems at best an odd choice for a President who won his office in large part on promises to “drain the swamp” in Washington. He has no history of looking out for American taxpayers; instead, he has allegedly has made a career out of over aggressively foreclosing on home borrowers. And now Mnuchin will be charged with regulating Goldman Sachs and One West, multi-billion dollar financial intuitions that he once led and which have histories of bending the law and taking advantage of their customers.

Goldman Sachs has admitted to defrauding investors and engineering major parts of the housing bubble that lead to the 2008 recession.

During the depths of the financial crisis in 2009, a group led by Mnuchin bought the troubled housing lender IndyMac and renamed it OneWest, with Mnuchin serving as chairman.

Two years later, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) issued a consent order against the bank after a review that “uncovered unsafe and unsound practices, violations of law and foreclosure processes geared toward speed and quantity, instead of quality and accuracy,” a statement at the time from OTS said.

Mnuchin has already failed to garner our trust as the next Treasury Secretary., Common Cause is asking the full Senate to scrutinize his nomination very carefully.

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