just as we knew that Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was the favorite to be Trump’s choice as Energy Secretary. (This despite the fact that, in 2012, when Perry ran for President, he wanted to abolish the department.)
.. If he had come out on Thursday and announced that, in spite of these warnings, he is going to retain ownership of his businesses, which is clearly what he intends to do, there could have been another political firestorm.
.. By postponing the event, Trump insured that the Electoral College will have already cast its votes when he announces that he intends to tell the ethics lawyers to go and jump in the Potomac. In a pair of tweets on Monday night, he confirmed that the most he is willing to do is hand day-to-day management of the Trump Organization over to his two eldest sons, Donald, Jr., and Eric, while still retaining ownership control.
.. Trump appears to have made a deal, at least an implicit one, with the Republican leaders in which they get their way on many of the big policy issues—taxes, education, the environment, regulation of finance and the labor market—and he gets to keep hold of his businesses, and his personal brand, the value of which, as he freely admitted a few weeks ago, has been greatly enhanced by his election victory.
.. the stock and pension rights that Tillerson accumulated at Exxon are worth about two hundred and ninety million dollars. And Bloomberg reckons that Gary Cohn, whom Trump has picked to head his National Economic Council, owns stock in Goldman Sachs, the investment bank where he is currently president and chief operating officer, worth more than two hundred million dollars.
.. Would he be willing to put that business at risk, by, for example, recommending to Trump that the U.S. government maintain, or even strengthen, its sanctions on Russia? (In 2014, Tillerson gave a speech opposing these sanctions.)
..
Cohn, as Trump’s top economic adviser, will be tasked with, among other things, helping to decide which of the financial regulations that were introduced after the financial crash of 2008 should be cast onto the Republican bonfire. In anticipation of a big rollback in federal oversight, stock in Goldman and other Wall Street firms has risen sharply since the election. Can Cohn, a big beneficiary of that rise, provide objective advice on this issue?
My concern with Trump’s team of generals
My issue with having a foreign policy Cabinet consisting of general officers and Goldman Sachs alums
All of the public opinion data shows that as public trust in institutions has waned, trust in the military has remained high. And this, in turn, has led to the militarization of foreign policy.
.. because of the gap in trust, the Pentagon commands an ever-growing share of the foreign affairs budget. This means it exercises operational control over a large swath of activities that heretofore were probably not thought of as being under the purview of the Defense Department.
.. In the long term, it is dangerous to signal that the best way to become secretary of state is to have achieved the rank of a general officer. There are a lot of other dimensions of foreign policy that go beyond military statecraft. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not a coincidence that the best secretaries of state over the past 40 years — George P. Shultz and James A. Baker — were originally secretaries of the Treasury
.. A team of generals might be talented, but it’s also one-dimensional.
.. appointing general officers to Cabinet-level positions could be a way to restore faith in government. And maybe they will do a great job and, like Washington or Cincinnatus, ride off into the sunset. Or it could just convince the public and the politicians that the only route to a policy principal position is not just service, but a lifelong career in the military.
.. the most talented former general would be serving an unpredictable, dangerous gasbag of a president. Failure is likely. In which case, Trump will have proven to be a true egalitarian, and have eviscerated public faith in the last outsized institution in America.
Steven Mnuchin’s Defining Moment: Seizing Opportunity From the Financial Crisis
Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury secretary made millions buying failed IndyMac and has résumé at odds with president-elect’s campaign rhetoric
Like other Trump cabinet picks, Mr. Mnuchin has a résumé that is at odds with much of the president-elect’s populist rhetoric on the campaign trail.
.. Mr. Trump is building a cabinet that combines traditional Republican Party leanings with unconventional elements, including people who made their fortunes by taking big investment risks. IndyMac was the defining deal of Mr. Mnuchin’s career. He knew that the government needed to sell the failed bank—and he played hardball.
.. Mr. Mnuchin, 53 years old, has no experience in government or running a large organization, though he was a campaign loyalist and fundraiser for Mr. Trump.
.. In the interview, Mr. Mnuchin said the new administration’s goal would be to achieve annual economic growth of 3% to 4%. He said his top policy priorities would be to overhaul the federal tax code, roll back certain financial regulations, review trade agreements and invest in infrastructure.
.. He said Mr. Trump won’t hesitate to call up corporate chiefs to lean on them about jobs, factory closures and other matters.
Sen. Ron Wyden .. Mr. Mnuchin has a “history of profiting off the victims of predatory lending.”
.. Mr. Mnuchin, whose father spent his entire career at Goldman
.. He made partner in 1994 and oversaw Goldman’s mortgage-trading desk before becoming chief information officer.
.. Messrs. Mnuchin and Trump were soon in the same philanthropic and social circles, attending dinner parties at each other’s Manhattan homes and mingling at the U.S. Open tennis tournament and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala... he said he has been a registered Republican for “as long as I can remember,” yet he also gave a total of $7,400 since 2000 to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaigns... Mr. Mnuchin donated to the campaigns of Democrats Barack Obama,John Edwards,John Kerry and Al Gore. The only Republican presidential candidate Mr. Mnuchin gave money to was Mitt Romney in 2012... In 2002, Mr. Mnuchin left Goldman and wound up running an investment fund set up by billionaire investor George Soros... Mr. Mnuchin assembled an all-star cast drawn from his years on Wall Street, including Mr. Soros, hedge-fund manager John Paulson, billionaire Michael Dell’s investment firm and several former Goldman executives, including J. Christopher Flowers. They signed up on the basis that Mr. Mnuchin would personally run the bank.. The FDIC also agreed to protect the buyers from the most severe losses for years. That loss-sharing arrangement turned out to be a master stroke... Banks often go out of their way to avoid losses, even when borrowers are in violation of loan terms. The loss-sharing agreement took away some of the disincentives, since future losses would be borne partly by the government... CIT agreed to buy OneWest for $3.4 billion, a bounty of more than $3 billion, including dividends. Mr. Mnuchin’s take was several hundred million dollar.. After the sale, newly discovered accounting problems forced CIT to take a $230 million charge.It inherited another problem from nearly $40 million of loans.. Mr. Mnuchin left CIT amid a management shake-up announced last year, receiving a $10.9 million severance payment. His exit came just as Mr. Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination was gaining momentum. “The timing worked out well,”
.. Mr. Mnuchin helped write a tax-cutting plan and tried to rein in some of Mr. Trump’s populist rhetoric, including his vow to not “let Wall street get away with murder,” people familiar with the matter said.
.. Mr. Mnuchin, who divorced his second wife in 2014, brought his fiancée, Scottish actress Louise Linton, on the Trump campaign plane
Trump’s Top Fundraiser Eyes the Deal of a Lifetime
Steven Mnuchin might have a shot at Treasury secretary, but his Wall Street pedigree makes him the type Donald Trump fans love to hate.
One theory bouncing between Manhattan and Beverly Hills holds that an investor with so much Wall Street blood in his veins spotted the trade of a lifetime. In exchange for a few months of unpaid work, Mnuchin gets a shot at joining President Trump’s cabinet. Goldman partners have wealth, and movie producers befriend stars, but the secretary of the Treasury gets his signature stamped on cash.
.. he sounds less like a political obsessive than an investor closing a deal he can’t quite discuss. “This was a unique moment in time where there’s a unique role for me,” he says. “It’s a unique moment in time,” he says again. “A unique opportunity to help.” But he will allow that the idea of a top Washington job appeals to him. “Yeah, it does,” he says. And for everyone on both coasts who still can’t believe Mnuchin has tied himself to Trump, he has an answer: “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?’ if I end up in the administration.”
.. Mnuchin helped work out a deal with the party for Trump to essentially outsource much of the work of raising money, and in return the RNC would get to pocket millions collected in his name. It was a classic Trump move. After his companies went bankrupt following debt-fueled bonanzas in the 1980s, Trump became a maestro of sticking his brand on someone else’s products—condos, cuff links, colognes. Mnuchin arranged for him to do the same thing on a presidential scale.
.. Mnuchin’s counterpart at the RNC is Lew Eisenberg, his father’s old partner at Goldman Sachs. “I knew him when he was 10,” Eisenberg says
.. Mnuchin was born into a level of privilege that makes Trump’s deluxe childhood look ordinary. His grandfather, an attorney, co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons, and his father, Robert, was a top Goldman Sachs trader who later became an art dealer. Mnuchin followed his father to Yale, where he lived in the old Taft Hotel with Eddie Lampert, now a billionaire investor, and Sam Chalabi, whose uncle, Ahmad, later ran the Iraqi National Congress.
.. In 2004, Mnuchin founded his own hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, named for a spot near his house in the Hamptons, and got hundreds of millions of dollars from Soros.
.. Mnuchin gathered some billionaire allies, including Soros and hedge fund manager John Paulson, and assembled a $1.6 billion bid to buy IndyMac. Mnuchin got an agreement that guaranteed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would absorb almost all the loan losses after a certain threshold.
.. “He’s a guy that can recognize an opportunity and adapt to it,” he says. “He’s able to switch into different things.”
.. betting markets give Trump as much as a 28 percent chance of winning. Those are long odds in politics but not too shabby on Wall Street, and if his man makes it, Mnuchin could nab something priceless. All it costs him is a few months and some behind-the-back talk from friends who think he’s selling out to a demagogue.
.. “If you want to support Hillary and you haven’t been doing it for 15 to 25 years, probably dating back to Bill, you may be too late. In fact, at this point you are too late,” Sobel says. “Trump as a candidate didn’t exist two years ago. He doesn’t have the legacy organization that you had to endure and claw your way through. There’s no political machine.”
.. the foul-mouthed provocateur Steve Bannon ..
.. e has only pleasantries to share about Bannon, also a Goldman Sachs alumnus. Two days later, campaign Chairman Paul Manafort is gone.
.. He won’t go into details about how he met Trump. Nor what he thinks about the candidate insulting the parents of an American soldier killed in action. Mnuchin won’t say whether Goldman’s Hank Paulson was a good Treasury secretary.
.. Mnuchin surveyed the U-shaped table setup and decided Trump’s seat was too close to a wall. He convinced the country club staff that there was enough time to move the furniture about 2 feet.
.. At an August Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons, he encountered Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor whom Trump floated as a Treasury pick last year. “I hear the rumor is you will be secretary of the Treasury,” Icahn told Mnuchin. “And I will support you 100 percent on that! Because there’s no f—ing way I would ever do that.”