Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a
terrible thing to waste.
Illustration: Joe Darrow
Steve Mnuchin knows his way around
a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling
multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God
closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous
speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin
didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism
hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to
play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a
failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and
resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO,
Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200
million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good
graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of
the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White
House.
Thus far, the
COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If
the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch
in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to
claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its
presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may
have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip.
Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest
stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund .
Which is to say:
We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to
the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this
one.
Of course, it wasn’t really God who
opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of
all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then
sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those
jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that
keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another
tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.
From the first
capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the
supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has
remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning
bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel
collective prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and
the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises.
In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk,
high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After
all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume
great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so
invested in it.
Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third
base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather
co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner
at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale
admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche,
and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been
harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher
still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the
latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic
sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s
colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have
suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than
pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin
Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood
up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one
colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid
his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a
motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a
stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men
franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a
tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the
housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career,
Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into
their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was
watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his
old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors
were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders,
waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we
need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this
game before.”
He played it like a
natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid.
Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock- full of toxic assets —
the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a
certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially
socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one
major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make
a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately
pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough
to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.
Purchasing IndyMac secured
OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that
much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the
process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long
and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve:
Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating
documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first
count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California
attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and
requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly
why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the
investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with
OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the
public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford
to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all
its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.
In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the
now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times
over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s
projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he
won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two
of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of
the future GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled
some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a
Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s
socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another
low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in
August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end
up in the administration.”
Mnuchin is the last of the “adults
in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the
West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of
the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite
combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each
turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it
takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers
in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest
police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression
hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal ’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.”
Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved
to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the
Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March
running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican
camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill.
“Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in
three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to
praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand”
devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”
The soft skills
Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the
passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to
admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in
federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as
much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable
loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and
onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a
Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and
Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid
has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our
nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer
benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The
Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of
cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out
hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven
shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems
and services could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the
legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion
Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin
significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost
credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of
subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of
preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management
for personal profit.
The White House’s
next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally
suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small
businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all
pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a
pandemic.
Nevertheless, could
we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP
president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and
toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in
coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without
proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others
fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so
others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars
in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion
in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance,
the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise
Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.
TRUMP’S ADMINISTRATION IS
INFESTED WITH GOLDMAN
SACHS JUST AS OBAMA-BIDEN’S
WAS WITH JAMIE
DIMON OF JP
MORGAN
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will
hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the
welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of
Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
Bullard
Says Unemployment
Could Rise to 30%
Photo by John
Vachon/Library Of Congress/Getty Images
23 Mar 2020523
1:15
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S.
economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households
and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to
cope with it and keep it under control.”
That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great
Depression.
Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in
the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so
long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary
authorities.
“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,”
Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those
quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.
Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,”
as some Fed watchers have claimed.
“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is
probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to
go.”
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
“The legal ring
surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic
corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT
TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening, this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in
power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD
TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the
period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have
gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."
Global economic slump
accelerating
As the coronavirus
spreads, taking more lives at an escalating rate, its effects are penetrating
ever deeper into the global economy.
GOLDMAN SACHS warned last week that US gross domestic
product (GDP) would contract by 24 percent in the second quarter. There are
forecasts that up to 5 million jobs will be lost in the American economy this
year, with the fall in economic output to total as much as $1.5 trillion.
GOLDMAN expects, at this stage, that US output will
contract 3.1 percent this year and the unemployment rate will rise to 9 percent
from the current level of 3.5 percent. This is on a par with the jobless rate
of 10 percent in October 2009, following the financial meltdown of 2008.
But just as the health
impact of the virus was significantly underestimated, the same may apply to the
current economic forecasts.
“Things look so gloomy
right now that perhaps we should be grateful if we can get out of this health
crisis with a brief recession,” Bernard Baumohl of the Economic Outlook Group
told the Wall Street Journal .
“You just cannot rule
out the prospect of a longer, more destructive depression,” he said.
In other words, a
relatively short but deep recession is now the “best case” scenario.
The eurozone is
expected to experience a fall of around 10 percent of GDP. But this forecast
could well be exceeded. There is no end in sight to the spread of the virus and
no clear assessment of the economic effect of the shutdowns being implemented
to try to combat it.
In an interview with
the Financial Times , the chief economist of the European Union,
Paolo Gentiloni, indicated that officials were working on new measures.
“The consensus is
growing day by day that we need to face an extraordinary crisis with
extraordinary tools,” he said.
“This idea of a V-shape
[recovery] that you can see in the first semester of 2020 is now completely
impossible. We have no previous analysis of the impact of such a widespread
lockdown in major economies.”
Gentolini conducted the
interview as part of a political battle inside the EU over the economic and
financial measures, bringing further into the open the widening rifts between
leading member states.
Powerful forces in
Germany and the Netherlands are opposed to all-European action, regarding this
as a bailout for weaker economies such as Italy.
On the other side, the
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire last week warned that failure to act in
a unified manner meant the eurozone was in danger of disappearing.
European Financial
Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau wrote yesterday that the situation
facing the eurozone was “far worse” than the sovereign debt crisis of 2012.
“The coronavirus will
prove to be an economic shock, a corporate solvency crisis and a political
crisis all folded into one,” he said.
Münchau noted that
European countries had fiscal stabilisers such as unemployment insurance, but
these “shock absorbers” were designed to deal with “normal fluctuations.” They
were not “big enough or strong enough for emergencies like this one.”
Pointing to the
deepening divisions in Europe, Münchau wrote that not everyone would want to be
in a monetary union with countries like the Netherlands where the prime
minister was “ideologically opposed” to all-European measures. “This sort of
unwilling partnership is not sustainable.”
In the absence of data
on overall output, the Financial Times conducted a survey,
particularly covering retail and services, to give some indication of what to
expect.
It showed that
vehicular traffic had halved in many of the world’s largest cities, while
spending in restaurants and cinemas had collapsed.
Greg Daco, the chief US
economist at Oxford Economics, said: “Looking at the data across various
sectors of the US economy, it appears we could be heading for the most severe
contraction in consumer spending on record.”
The rapid shrinkage in
the real economy will further escalate the already severe crisis in the
financial system, and extend from the stock and credit markets to the banks.
In a Financial
Times comment, Sheila Bair, the former chief of the US Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation, wrote: “Big banks throughout the world are
substantially exposed to the pandemic, particularly as it hurts corporate
borrowers.”
Around the world,
non-financial corporations covering every industry, including the hard-hit
energy, transport, retail and hospitality sectors, had racked up debts to the
tune of $70 trillion, she wrote.
“To survive, they are
increasingly hoarding cash and tapping into their massive back-up lines of
credit, placing additional strain on the banking system,” Bair wrote, noting
that as bond markets “seize up,” bank credit may be their only source of cash.
But the ability to
supply credit, she wrote, had been considerably weakened by the $325 billion
paid out by the major global banks last year on dividends and share buybacks,
some $155 billion of which was laid out by the eight largest banks in the US.
Meanwhile, fears are
growing that the enormous pile of debt around the world could start to collapse
as the economic effects of the coronavirus deepen and widen.
According to the
Institute of International Finance, in a report published last November, total
global corporate, government, finance sector and household debt had reached
$253 trillion, equivalent to 322 percent of global GDP.
The unravelling could
start in so-called emerging market economies where there is $72.5 trillion of
debt, much of it denominated in US dollars. The growing dollar shortage in
international markets, which has seen national currencies fall against the
greenback, means obligations on interest and principal payments are rapidly
rising.
This increase in the
debt burden is occurring as all economies drop into recession, or something
worse, and have less cash to meet their commitments.
It is not just emerging
market economies that are affected. The Australian dollar, one of the most
traded in the world, saw its rate against the US dollar drop to as low as 55
cents last week, compared to just under 70 cents a few months ago.
This means that the
debt burden of a company or financial institution that had raised $100 million,
when the Australian dollar traded at 70 cents to the US currency, would rise in
Australian dollar terms from $A143 million to more than $A180 million when the
Australian dollar fell to 55 cents, placing it under enormous strain as
revenues drop.
The cash flow crisis is
striking at the heart of the major economies as well.
In the UK, the Tory
government is considering a plan to take out equity holdings in airlines and
other companies because the economic stimulus packages announced so far are not
sufficient to prevent collapses.
In the US, the Wall
Street Journal has reported that “scores of US companies,” from the
aircraft maker Boeing to the telecommunications Verizon, are “furiously
lobbying” to be included in the bailout packages being prepared by the Trump
administration that could run as high as $2 trillion.
For more than a
century, the semi-official religion in the US has been the denunciation of
socialism, which Trump had planned to make the centre of his re-election
campaign.
Now the universal cry
is: the state must intervene; once again billions must be handed to the
corporations on an even larger scale than in the crisis of 2008.
The calls will only get
louder. According to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday,
investors and analysts say the more than 30 percent drop in the share market
over the past month is not over, despite extraordinary actions by the Fed
involving trillions of dollars.
Summing up the
voracious outlook in corporate and financial circles, a representative of the
global investment and banking firm State Street, told the Journal :
“Market participants need to feel they are backstopped without question.”
Then
Congress rushed through a record $2.2 trillion
economic “rescue” bill, whose
main purpose was to provide
the Treasury and the Federal Reserve the necessary
authority to bail out corporate America and Wall Street.
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