President-Elect Donald Trump today announced that he will nominate banker Steven Mnuchin to serve as treasury secretary. Mnuchin served most recently as Trump’s campaign finance chairman.
Early in his career, Mnuchin was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for 17 years. He was later a hedge fund investor and a leader of the team that purchased failed bank IndyMac in 2009. He was chairman and CEO at the new bank, which was renamed OneWest Bank, and later sold to CIT Group.
“Our most important priority is sustained economic growth,” he said in an appearance this morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” arguing that the economy can return to consistent 3-4 percent GDP growth and that the administration’s first effort to that end will be tax reform. Mnuchin added that “we want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending [as] the number one priority on the regulatory side.”
Speaking about Wilbur Ross — an investor and banker specializing in leveraged buyouts whom Trump today named secretary of commerce — Mnuchin said that “we’ve been in the business of regional banking and we understand what it is to make loans. That’s the engine of growth to small- and medium-sized businesses.”
