President-Elect Donald Trump has been busy making many appointments to his presidential cabinet. Recently, he chose a prominent businessperson to be his Treasury Secretary — entrepreneur, former investment banker and Hollywood film producer Steven Mnuchin.
To be sure, Mnuchin is more of a “blue-chip” selection for Trump’s cabinet than some of the real estate mogul’s other picks. Mnuchin grew up in a banking family, went to an Ivy League school (Yale) and worked for one of the investment houses that Trump often decried in his presidential campaign — Goldman Sachs. That said, Mnuchin is not your average banker; in fact, he hasn’t worked for Goldman Sachs in 15 years.
In 2004, Mnuchin started his own hedge fund, called Dune Capital Management. Dune invested in two of Donald Trump’s real estate projects and purchased the failed housing loan company IndyMac for $1.6 billion. This was in the wake of the mortgage-backed securities crisis of 2008, which deeply affected the nation’s property lending businesses. Mnuchin and his partners renamed IndyMac “OneWest” and sold it in 2015 to CIT Group, a financial services company, for $3.4 billion — not a bad profit for six years worth of ownership.
That sale got him out of the investment business, but Mnuchin already had begun to focus on another field which interested him in the early 2000s — motion pictures.
In 2004, Mnuchin formed RatPac-Dune Entertainment with financier James Packer and movie director Brett Ratner, who helmed the big-budget Rush Hour series of films with action-film star Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. Ratner also directed the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, and produced the popular Fox television show Prison Break.
RatPac-Dune was responsible for all of the X-Men films as well as James Cameron’s epic Avatar and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. The company also produced the successful new Mad Max: Fury Road movie.
Mnuchin also co-chaired Relativity Media, a “mini-major” global studio, sports and entertainment franchise that distributed almost 200 movies, generating more than $17 billion in box-office revenues and received 60 Academy Award nominations.
In his private life, Mnuchin is engaged to actress Louise Linton, who appeared with actors Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise in the 2006 film Lions for Lambs. Linton also has had parts in television shows CSI:NY and Cold Case.
Mnuchin was an early supporter of Donald Trump’s campaign in the Republican primaries and helped Trump win the New York GOP primary in July of this year. Following that victory, Trump asked Mnuchin to be his campaign finance chairman. Mnuchin accepted the offer and worked closely with Republican National Committee Finance Chairman Lew Eisenberg during the remainder of Trump’s bitterly contested race with Democrat Hillary Clinton. Mnuchin helped Trump raise a much-needed half billion dollars in that crucial period, allowing the candidate to ably compete with Clinton, who spent double Trump’s sum and still lost.
For Trump, 53-year-old Mnuchin will be a key appointment as far as the economy is concerned.
Mnuchin will be in charge of streamlining the tax code, a major portion of Trump’s campaign commitments to voters. Mnuchin has confirmed that middle-class tax cuts are planned, even for single-parent households, some of which were not expecting cuts under previously announced Trump programs.
Mnuchin stressed that the new administration has to work with Congress, but the plan is to give child-care credits to parents, which would be part of the savings.
For top-tier earners, the pre-election Trump tax plan projected an average tax cut of 14 percent. Mnuchin said that at the very top, there may not be effective tax cuts due to caps placed on mortgage interest deductions and other limitations. However, tax rates for all upper-range incomes will be lowered. In general, it’s expected that the tax code for all U.S. citizens will be simplified.
Mnuchin also wants to loosen Dodd-Frank rule restraints on Wall Street via deregulation to allow the investment sector to “roar.” Mnuchin has said he expects the U.S. economy to return to a three-to-four percent annual growth rate quickly, reprising the expansion it underwent prior to the administration of Barack Obama. In fact, Obama was the first postwar president to not have one year of annual growth measuring at least three percent during his time in office.
Mnuchin also said he expects wages to rise and more jobs to be created — and not just any jobs. Rather than the service sector positions that Obama crowed about during his tenure, Mnuchin wants the U.S. to create more genuine manufacturing and productivity roles — jobs that will put assembly line employees back to work and help restore the U.S.’s position as a premier industrial power.
Due to his banking background, Mnuchin’s appointment has been roundly criticized by Democrats. But it’s a rare banker who says they want wages to increase, rather than fall.
Certainly, Trump’s relationship with Mnuchin has proved that Mnuchin is someone the new president can trust, and given Mnuchin’s savvy in the investment community and in Hollywood, he’s proved capable of running numerous successful businesses in the past.
Already, the stock market is hitting record highs after Trump’s election in anticipation of the positive changes that will be occurring in the American economy. Hopefully, Mnuchin and his new underlings can stick to implementing Trump’s campaign promises with a minimum of obstacles over the next four years.
~American Liberty Report
