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Steven Terner Mnuchin (born December 21, 1962) is an American banker, film producer, and political fundraiser. He was a partner for Goldman Sachs for 17 years where he accrued a net worth estimated at about $40 million. He then founded the motion picture firm, RatPac-Dune Entertainment. In 2016, he served as finance chair in the successful Donald J. Trump presidential campaign.

On November 30, 2016, it was announced that Mnuchin would be nominated as Secretary of the Treasury in the coming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. [1]

Early life-—Mnuchin was born on December 21, 1962 in New York City, to a Jewish family.[2][3][4] He is the son of Elaine Terner Cooper, of New York, and Robert E. Mnuchin, of Washington, Connecticut.[5] His father was a banker, a partner at Goldman Sachs, in charge of equity trading and a member of the management committee, and the founder of the Mnuchin Gallery at 45 East 78th Street, New York.[5][6] He graduated from Yale University.[5] The lead editorial in REVIEW & OUTLOOK in the Thursday, December 1, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal characterized Mnuchin as someone “who drove a Porsche in college”.[7]

Career

Mnuchin accrued a net worth estimated at about $40 million while working for Goldman Sachs for 17 years, where his father had worked for three decades and had also made a fortune.[8][9]

In 2002, Mnuchin left Goldman and worked briefly for his Yale roommate Edward Lampert, chief executive of Sears. He also briefly worked for Soros Fund Management in their private equity division during the “Goldman” period with Jacob Goldfield and Mark Schwartz.

After this stint, he founded RatPac-Dune Entertainment, which produced a number of notable films, including the X-Men film franchise and Avatar.[9]

In 2004, he also founded a hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, named for a spot near his house in the Hamptons. The firm invested in at least two Donald Trump projects and, in one of them, was sued by Trump before a settlement was reached. Then, in partnership with Soros, hedge fund manager John Paulson and others, Mnuchin bought the failed housing lender IndyMac in 2009 for $1.6 billion.[10] The bank, purchased out of bankruptcy from the FDIC, was renamed OneWest, with Mnuchin as chair. 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”. OneWest was sold to CIT Group in 2015.[8]

In November 2016, two nonprofits filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging redlining by OneWest Bank.[11]

The California Reinvestment Coalition, which opposed CIT Group’s acquisition of OneWest, helped to highlight a number of issues about the bank, using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. First, the “shared loss agreements” that Mnuchin and his group of investors secured from the FDIC when buying IndyMac and La Jolla banks proved to be quite lucrative. According to data obtained from the FDIC, as of December 2014, it had already paid out over $1 billion to OneWest for the costs of failed loans (foreclosures). The FDIC estimated it would have to pay out another $1.4 billion to OneWest before 2019.[12]

CRC also submitted a FOIA request to United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to learn more about OneWest’s reverse mortgage subsidiary, Financial Freedom. According to the data that HUD provided in its FOIA response, Financial Freedom foreclosed on 16,220 federally insured reverse mortgages from April 2009 to April 2016. This represents about 39% of all federally insured reverse mortgage foreclosures during that time frame. The 39% figure was criticized by CRC, who estimated that Financial Freedom only serviced about 17% of the market. In other words, Financial Freedom was foreclosing at twice the amount that one would expect, given its share of the market.[13]

CIT Group, which purchased OneWest in August 2015 for $3.4 billion,[10] disclosed to investors that it had received subpoenas from HUD’s Office of the Inspector General in the third and fourth quarters of 2015.[14]

Because Mnuchin received stock in CIT Group when it purchased OneWest, it’s possible he could sell it tax free if he were confirmed to be Treasury Secretary and if he reinvested the proceeds in Treasuries or government approved funds, according to Bloomberg, which suggests Mnuchin has $97 million in CIT stock.[15]

In Hollywood, Mnuchin, along with film producer Brett Ratner and financier James Packer, working with RatPac-Dune Entertainment, produced American Sniper and Mad Max: Fury Road. Mnuchin was co-chairman of the trio’s movie company, Relativity Media, but left before it went bankrupt.[8] A source close to the company said that he had resigned because of the potential for a conflict of interest between his duties at Relativity and OneWest, which had been sold days ago; weeks prior to Relativity’s insolvency filling, OneWest was allowed to drain $50 million from it.[9]

In late April 2016, Mnuchin was named finance chair of the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign. He had been an early supporter of the candidate and attended the victory party after the New York Republican primary victory on April 19. The next day he accepted Trump’s invitation to be finance chair.[16] Mnuchin, who had given to Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “mostly [as] favors for friends who were fundraisers”, worked with RNC counterpart Lew Eisenberg on a late-developing joint operation for the committee and the Trump campaign. Eisenberg had been a Goldman partner of Mnuchin’s father. The late-summer fundraising goal was half a billion dollars.[10]

In November 2016, Mnuchin was reported to be President-elect Trump’s choice to be U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. He would be “the third Goldman alumnus to serve in the job, after Henry M. Paulson Jr., under President George W. Bush; and Robert E. Rubin, under President Bill Clinton” in the 2000s and 1990s respectively.[16]

Personal life

In 1999, Mnuchin married Heather deForest Crosby,[5] who was his second wife,[17] and they had three children together.[18] They divorced in 2014. He is engaged to the actress Louise Linton, and they live in a $26.5 million house that he owns in Bel Air, California.[17][18] (WIKI)