Trump's reported pick for treasury secretary is a former Goldman Sachs partner who drove a Porsche in college
Donald Trump is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he has chosen Steven Mnuchin, the finance chairman of his presidential campaign who spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs, as his treasury secretary.
In August, Mnuchin, who has no political experience and previously made most of his campaign contributions to Democrats, was profiled by Bloomberg Politics. His father was a partner at Goldman Sachs, and while attending Yale, Mnuchin drove a Porsche and roomed with Eddie Lampert, now a billionaire, and Sam Chalabi, whose uncle Ahmad went on to run the Iraqi National Congress. Mnuchin was tapped to join the secretive, elite Skull and Bones club. He once worked at Soros Fund Management and was chairman of Dune Capital Management, and in 2008, along with some other billionaire investors, he made a $1.6 billion bid on IndyMac after it collapsed. They gave the bank the name OneWest, and it was profitable after a year; in August 2015, they sold it for $3.4 billion.
In April, Trump, who years ago worked on a few building deals with Mnuchin, asked him to be his national finance chairman. Mnuchin's friends told Bloomberg they were shocked, and they had no idea he even knew Trump — many have privately decided he saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime trade, where he worked free of charge for a few months for a shot at being in the Cabinet.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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