Steven Mnuchin

Steven Terner Mnuchin ( mə-NOO-shin; born December 21, 1962) is an American investment banker and film producer who served as the 77th United States secretary of the treasury as part of the first cabinet of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. Serving for nearly a full presidential term, Mnuchin was one of the few high-profile members of Trump's cabinet whom the president did not dismiss during his first term.

Mnuchin was born in New York City. Upon graduating from Yale University in 1985, Mnuchin joined the investment bank Goldman Sachs where his father, Robert Mnuchin, was a general partner. Mnuchin worked at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, eventually becoming its chief information officer. After he left Goldman Sachs in 2002, he worked for and founded several hedge funds and launched Dune Entertainment, a film production company that financed several films for 20th Century Fox. He later served on the boards of Kmart and Sears Holdings. During the 2008 financial crisis, he bought failed residential bank Indymac, which he reorganized as OneWest Bank and resold, becoming embroiled in lawsuits over questionable foreclosures.

Mnuchin joined Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, and was named National Finance Chairman for the campaign. On February 13, 2017, Mnuchin was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Secretary of the Treasury by a vote of 53–47. As Secretary of the Treasury, Mnuchin supported the Trump tax cuts and the tax reform of 2017, and advocated reducing personal and corporate tax rates. In regard to regulatory policy, Mnuchin supported President Trump’s partial repeal of the Dodd–Frank Act, citing the complexity of the legislation.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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