Steven Mnuchin

Early life and education

Steven Mnuchin was born on December 21, 1962, in New York City, the second-youngest son in his family. Mnuchin's family is Jewish. He is the son of Robert E. Mnuchin of Washington, Connecticut, and Elaine Terner Cooper of New York. Robert Mnuchin was a partner at Goldman Sachs in charge of equity trading and a member of the management committee. He is also the founder of an art gallery in New York City, the Mnuchin Gallery. Mnuchin's great-grandfather, Aaron Mnuchin, a Russian-born diamond dealer who later resided in Belgium, emigrated to the U.S. in 1916.

Mnuchin attended Riverdale Country School in New York City. He graduated from Yale University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in economics. At Yale, Mnuchin was publisher of the Yale Daily News, and was also initiated into Skull and Bones in 1985. While a student at Yale, Mnuchin drove a Porsche and lived at New Haven's Taft Hotel.

Mnuchin's first job was as a trainee at investment bank Salomon Brothers in the early 1980s, while still studying at Yale.

Finance and banking career

Goldman Sachs

Mnuchin graduated from Yale in 1985 and started working for Goldman Sachs, where his father had been employed since 1957. Mnuchin started in the mortgage department, and became a partner at Goldman in 1994. Until he left the company in 2002, Mnuchin held the following positions as a partner:

November 1994 – December 1998: Head of the Mortgage Securities Department

December 1998 – November 1999: Overseeing mortgages, U.S. governments, money markets, and municipals at Fixed Income, Currency and Commodities Division

December 1999 – February 2001: Member of the Executive Committee and co-head of the Technology Operating Committee

February 2001 – December 2001: Executive Vice President and co-chief information officer

December 2001 – 2002: Executive vice president, member of the Management Committee, and chief information officer

Mnuchin left Goldman Sachs in 2002 after 17 years of employment, with an estimated $46 millions of company stock and $12.6 million in compensation that he received in the months prior to his departure.

Hedge funds

After he left Goldman Sachs in 2002, Mnuchin briefly worked as vice-chairman of hedge fund ESL Investments, which is owned by his Yale roommate Edward Lampert. From 2003 to 2004, he worked as Chief Executive Officer at SFM Capital Management, a fund backed by George Soros. Mnuchin founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital Management, named for a spot near his house in The Hamptons, in 2004 with two former Goldman partners. After its founding, Mnuchin served as the CEO of the company. The firm invested in at least two Donald Trump projects, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Honolulu and its namesake in Chicago. Dune Capital Management and other lenders to the skyscraper in Chicago were sued by Trump before a settlement was reached.

Mnuchin became a director of Kmart when it exited bankruptcy through an investment by ESL. When the company merged in 2005 with Sears to form Sears Holdings, he continued on the board of the new company until his nomination as Treasury secretary in 2016. After Sears Holdings' bankruptcy in 2018 the company's estate sued the former management, including Lampert and Mnuchin, for "asset stripping" during their tenure. The lawsuit ended in 2022 with a $175 million settlement in the estate's favor.

Mnuchin was outbid by Lone Star Funds on a portfolio of residential mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations being sold by Merrill Lynch during the 2008 financial crisis, which sold for $6.7 billion.

Mnuchin has been criticized for his use of offshore entities for investment purposes as a hedge-fund manager, which is a common practice in the industry. Mnuchin has stated: "In no way did I use [offshore entities] to avoid U.S. taxes."

OneWest

In 2009, a group led by Mnuchin bought California-based residential lender IndyMac, which had been in receivership by the FDIC and owned $23.5 billion in commercial loans, mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities. The purchase price was a $4.7 billion discount to its book value. Mnuchin's investment group included George Soros, hedge-fund manager John Paulson, former Goldman Sachs executive J. Christopher Flowers, and Dell Computer founder Michael Dell. The FDIC agreed to retain some of the more problematic assets of the bank, and signed a loss-sharing agreement. The FDIC was estimated to be required to pay $2.4 billion to IndyMac under the shared loss agreement. After purchasing IndyMac, renamed OneWest Bank, Mnuchin moved into a 20,000 square foot house in Bel Air to begin his tenure as CEO and chairman. OneWest then bought several other failed banks including First Federal Bank of California in 2009 and La Jolla Bank in 2010. Furthermore, OneWest bought a portfolio belonging to Citi Holdings for $1.4 billion. OneWest was profitable one year after Mnuchin had bought it, and it became the largest bank of Southern California, with assets worth $27 billion.

In 2015, Mnuchin sold OneWest to CIT Group for $3.4 billion. After the acquisition by CIT, Mnuchin remained at OneWest, and became a member of CIT Group's board of directors. As of August 2016, Mnuchin owned $97 million in CIT Group stock, most of which he had received in exchange for his stake in OneWest. On December 2, 2016, Mnuchin resigned from the board of directors of CIT as a result of his selection as nominee for Secretary of the Treasury.

OneWest was criticized for aggressively foreclosing on homeowners. In the five years following Mnuchin's acquisition of OneWest, the bank foreclosed on 36,000 homes in California, leading local activists to begin calling Mnuchin "the foreclosure king." The high foreclosure rate might have been a result of the loss sharing agreement with the FDIC, whereby the FDIC had to reimburse OneWest for losses. According to The New York Times, OneWest "was involved in a string of lawsuits over questionable foreclosures, and settled several cases for millions of dollars". Because of these foreclosures, around 100 protesters of Occupy Los Angeles gathered outside Mnuchin's home in October 2011 and held signs that read "Make Banks Pay". Two California fair-housing groups filed complaints to the federal government alleging that OneWest had violated the Fair Housing Act by not lending money to African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.

In November 2016, after OneWest was sold to CIT, the California Reinvestment Coalition submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to learn more about CIT's reverse mortgage subsidiary, Financial Freedom. According to the HUD's response, CIT/Financial Freedom foreclosed on 16,220 federally insured reverse mortgages from April 2009 to April 2016. This represented about 39% of all federally insured reverse mortgage foreclosures during that time. CRC estimated that Financial Freedom serviced only about 17% of the market and thus was foreclosing more than twice as often as its competitors. CIT Group disclosed to investors that it had received subpoenas from HUD's Office of the Inspector General in the third and fourth quarters of 2015. In November 2016, two non-profits filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging redlining by OneWest Bank.

Liberty Strategic Capital

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Mnuchin established an investment fund, Liberty Strategic Capital. The fund obtained funds from the Saudis, Emirati and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. According to the New York Times, "The scale of Mr. Mnuchin’s fund and its investments from countries where he traveled as Treasury secretary have raised questions about whether he used his government role to enrich himself."

On March 6, 2024, Liberty lead the group of investors including Hudson Bay and Reverence Capital to invest over $1B in NYCB. Mnuchin became a board member of the bank, that was suffering from heavy losses.

On March 14, 2024, Mnuchin announced that he's putting together the group of investors to buy TikTok. “This should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China,” Mnuchin said.

Film production career

In 2004, Mnuchin founded Dune Entertainment as a side business. It financed a number of large-budget films, mostly for 20th Century Fox, including the X-Men film franchise and Avatar. In 2012, after Dune's deal with 20th Century Fox ended, Mnuchin worked with the filmmaker Brett Ratner and the Australian businessman James Packer to merge his Dune Entertainment company with Ratner and Packer's newly founded RatPac Entertainment joint venture. This formed RatPac-Dune Entertainment, which agreed to a financing deal with Warner Bros.

Between 2013 and 2018, RatPac-Dune financed many films for Warner Bros., including American Sniper and Mad Max: Fury Road. Mnuchin was co-chairman of the trio's movie company, Relativity Media, but left seven months before it went bankrupt. A source close to the company said he had resigned because of the potential for a conflict of interest between his duties at Relativity and OneWest. He and other investors reportedly lost $80 million.

Politics

Donations

Before joining the presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016, Mnuchin had been involved in politics only by donating money to campaigns. Between 1995 and 2014, he donated over $120,000 to political organizations, PACs, politicians, and political parties. His contributions to candidates included 11 donations to Republicans and 36 donations to Democrats. The campaigns of Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney were among those to which he donated money. Mnuchin later stated most of those donations were favors for friends.

Between June and September 2016, Mnuchin donated over $400,000 to the Republican Party, including donations to Paul Ryan and Donald Trump. Earlier in 2016, Mnuchin had donated $4,000 to Democrats Kamala Harris and Michael Wildes.

2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump

Mnuchin was an early supporter of Trump, and attended his victory party after the New York Republican primary victory on April 19, 2016, for which he received a last-minute invitation. He was called the following day by Trump, who asked him if he wanted to be the national finance chairman of his campaign. Mnuchin, who later said in an interview he had known Trump "for over fifteen years", accepted the offer. In a statement announcing the appointment, Trump said: "Steven is a professional at the highest level, with an extensive and very successful financial background." He also said Mnuchin would bring "unprecedented experience and expertise" that would benefit the Republican Party. After being appointed as the Trump campaign's main fundraiser, Mnuchin said: "It's a great privilege to be working with Mr. Trump to create a world-class finance organization to support the campaign in the General Election."

Mnuchin worked with Republican National Committee counterpart Lewis Eisenberg on a late-developing joint operation for the committee and the Trump campaign. Before Mnuchin's appointment, no large-scale fundraising operation had been started for the Trump campaign. The late-summer fundraising goal was close to $500 million. The New York Times described Mnuchin's role during the campaign as "relatively behind the scenes", and the newspaper noticed he never "seemed to seek the spotlight". During an interview, Mnuchin said that because of his connection to the Trump campaign, "a lot of people in California and New York [...] wanted to stop being friends". After Trump won the election, he announced that Mnuchin would join the transition team on November 11.

Political views

In a November 30, 2016, interview on CNBC, Mnuchin called it the Trump administration's job to "make sure that the average American has wage increases and good jobs". Furthermore, he said his priority was getting a sustained growth of GDP of 3% or 4%. He said in order to get there, "our number one priority is tax reform". Mnuchin said he would reduce corporate taxes to 15%, cut taxes for the middle class, and simplify the tax system. When asked about trade, he said he believed in trade deals with individual countries, as opposed to regional trade deals. Mnuchin said, "This president [...] is going to have open communication with business leaders", when asked about keeping jobs from being offshored to Mexico. During the interview, he also said he wants to "strip back parts of Dodd–Frank" because he argued it was too complicated, and it prevented banks from lending. He called the stripping back of Dodd–Frank "the number-one priority on the regulatory side". David Levinthal, a senior political reporter for Business Insider stated in a 2020 article at the Center for Public Integrity that Mnuchin lacks a definite political orientation and that he was sought by candidate Trump due to his financial connections and ability to raise campaign funds.

Secretary of the Treasury (2017–2021)

Nomination and confirmation

On November 30, 2016, Donald Trump announced on his website that he would nominate Mnuchin as United States Secretary of the Treasury. In the statement, Trump called Mnuchin a "world-class financier, banker, and businessman", and he said Mnuchin played an important role in developing his "plan to build a dynamic, booming economy". Mnuchin himself said he was "honored to have the opportunity to serve our great country in this important role". He called Trump's economic agenda a "bold" one "that creates good-paying jobs and defends the American worker".

On February 1, 2017, the Senate Finance Committee approved his nomination by a vote of 11–0 with all Democrats boycotting the vote, sending the nomination to the Senate floor.

After the nomination was announced, Mnuchin resigned from his position on the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to which he had donated between $100,000 and $250,000. When the pick was announced, Mnuchin was also a member of the boards of UCLA Health System, the NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, and the Los Angeles Police Foundation.

The New York Times noted that Mnuchin's selection "fits uneasily with much of Mr. Trump's campaign attacks on the financial industry". For example, an ad of Trump's campaign said Goldman Sachs' CEO had "robbed [the] working class". Mnuchin is the third former Goldman-Sachs executive to serve in the job, after Hank Paulson, under President George W. Bush, and Robert Rubin, under President Bill Clinton, in the 2000s and 1990s, respectively.

During his Senate confirmation hearing on January 19, 2017, Mnuchin was criticized by Democrats for OneWest's foreclosure practices. Mnuchin said: "Since I was first nominated to serve as treasury secretary, I have been maligned as taking advantage of others' hardships in order to earn a buck. Nothing could be further from the truth". During the hearing, it was also noted that Mnuchin had failed to disclose $95 million of real estate that he owned and his role as director of Dune Capital International, an investment fund in a tax haven. Mnuchin described the omissions as mistakes made amid a mountain of bureaucracy.

Following Trump's January 2017 announcement about an investigation into voter registration, it was discovered that Mnuchin is registered to vote in both California and New York.

Tenure

Mnuchin, when asked in an interview with Mike Allen of Axios "whether he was worried about AI displacing jobs, replied: 'not at all ... I think we are so far away from that' — 50 or 100 years — 'it's not even on my radar screen'." Former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers was among critics of the statement, likening it to climate denial and creationism. Fortune columnist Alan Murray, noting the dispute, said he thought "the core of the misunderstanding is the term 'artificial intelligence'". While he felt Mnuchin expressed understanding of the role of technology in the labor market and also worried that the secretary and President Donald Trump were both in their ways underestimating technology's impact, he thought the climate-denial charge was excessive.

Mnuchin clashed frequently with trade advisor Peter Navarro, who had a more hawkish stance on trade with China; Navarro accused Mnuchin without evidence of having "made millions from Communist China." In May 2018, during a visit to China for trade talks, Navarro and Mnuchin started screaming and cursing at each other on the lawn in front of the Chinese government building where the talks were held after Navarro confronted Mnuchin because he believed that he had been excluded from certain meetings with Chinese officials.

In August 2020, Mnuchin and Navarro started a shouting match in the Oval Office in front of Trump about the fate of TikTok in what was described by The Washington Post as a "knockdown, drag-out brawl". Mnuchin began arguing that TikTok should be sold to a U.S. company, while Navarro demanded an outright ban on the app.

In January 2020, Mnuchin dismissed environmental activist Greta Thunberg, saying she should go to college and study economics before weighing in on policy. Others responded to Mnuchin, noting that thousands of economists with PhDs had signed a letter calling for taxation of carbon dioxide emissions.

On June 12, 2017, Mnuchin denied the debt ceiling not being raised before the August recess would cease federal government operations, and said Congress should weigh the option of "changing the timing so that the debt ceiling matches the budget process so we don't have to deal with this in this format" during a House appropriations subcommittee hearing. On June 14, during a prepared testimony ahead of the House subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs, Mnuchin said the budget proposal on the part of the Trump administration "should send a message that the international financial institutions need to operate more efficiently".

Personal life

Mnuchin's mother was a long-time investor with Bernie Madoff. After his mother died in early 2005, Mnuchin and his brother liquidated her investments, making $3.2 million. A Madoff trustee sued to retrieve the money from the Mnuchins, but a court ruled that the Madoff trust could recoup money only from those who had cashed out less than two years before the December 2008 collapse of Madoff's company.

Marriages and children

From 1992 to 1999, Mnuchin was married to Kathryn Leigh McCarver.

In 1999, Mnuchin married Heather deForest Crosby, and they had three children together. Heather Mnuchin was active in philanthropy and AZIAM yoga. After he bought IndyMac, Mnuchin moved to a 21,000-square-foot (2,000 m2), $26.5 million house in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California, because the company's headquarters was in Pasadena. They divorced in 2014.

Mnuchin married actress Louise Linton on June 24, 2017. Vice President Mike Pence presided over the ceremony. A 2017 photo of Mnuchin and Linton holding up the sheet of new $1 bills, as they toured the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, drew wide mockery on the Internet and became a meme. In 2023, Linton had a daughter with Mnuchin.

Non-profit work

Mnuchin served as a member of the development board of Yale University, as a board member of the Riverdale Country School, as a member of the national board and senior member of the non-profit youth organization Junior Achievement, to which he had donated money, and as a board member of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.