Tag Archives: mnuchin

No, China Didn’t Suddenly Stop Manipulating Their Currency When Trump Was Elected

by CarmineFenbury Posted on May 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here’s a snippet from the Economist’s interview with President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The subject is whether China is manipulating its currency in a way that hurts the United States:

Trump: They’re actually not a currency manipulator. You know, since I’ve been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped.

Mnuchin: Right, as soon as the president got elected they went the other way.

It’s tiresome to hear Trump say this, and doubly tiresome to hear Mnuchin chime in like a toady about it. Yes sir, Mr. President, they stopped as soon as they realized a real man was about to occupy the White House!

Here’s all you need to know about Chinese currency manipulation:

All the way through 2013, China’s foreign reserves increased nearly every quarter. This was because they were buying lots and lots of dollars as a way of keeping the value of the yuan low, which made Chinese exports cheaper and American imports more expensive. In mid-2014 they stopped. Since then, they’ve mostly sold their dollar holdings, to the tune of a trillion dollars over the past couple of years. During this entire time the yuan has been falling on its own, and the Chinese intervention has had the effect of propping it up to prevent it from falling even faster. This makes Chinese exports more expensive and American imports cheaper, which is exactly what we want.

As for November 2016, nothing happened. I don’t know if Trump knows this, since he seems to live in some kind of alternate reality, but Mnuchin does. So does everyone else.

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No, China Didn’t Suddenly Stop Manipulating Their Currency When Trump Was Elected

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Trump’s IRS Budget Cut, Explained

by LinaCantu466770 Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Catherine Rampell notes a contradiction:

This is easily explained. First, Republicans routinely try to cut the IRS enforcement budget as a favor to the rich, who dislike being audited. Second, Trump’s budget, like his tweets, is a showpiece for his fans, not a serious document.

See, Congress is going to ignore Trump’s budget, and he knows it. However, he wants credit for having the guts to shake things up and propose big cuts. This will impress his base, which naively assumes that things like official budget documents are serious stuff. What’s more, years from now, when we’re running monster deficits thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, he’ll be able to say that he tried to cut the budget, but couldn’t get the pathetic lifers in Congress to go along.

It’s all part of the Trump Show, and we are just the audience.

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Trump’s IRS Budget Cut, Explained

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These 5 Trump Cabinet Members Have Made False Statements to Congress

by KaleyZhk6326909 Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

As most of the world knows by now, Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not tell the truth when he was asked during his confirmation hearings about contacts with Russian officials.

But Sessions isn’t the only one. At least four other cabinet members made statements during their nomination hearings that are contradicted by actual facts: EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

The statements were all made under oath, except those of DeVos. It is a crime to “knowingly” lie in testimony to Congress, but it’s rarely prosecuted.

If you know of instances that we’ve missed, email us.

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt

The falsehood: Pruitt stated in testimony that he had never used a private email account to conduct business while he was Oklahoma’s attorney general.

The truth: Fox News 25 asked the state Attorney General’s office whether Pruitt had used a personal email. The answer was yes.

The Associated Press also received emails in response to a public records request showing Pruitt using a private account to conduct state business.

Pruitt’s response: None.

Education Secretary Betsy Devos

The falsehood: DeVos said during her confirmation hearings that she has not been involved in her family’s foundation, which has given millions of dollars to group that oppose LGBT rights.

“You sit on the board,” Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., noted. DeVos responded, “I do not.”

The truth: As The Intercept has detailed, tax filings have listed DeVos as vice president of the foundation’s board for 17 years.

DeVos’ response: She said the foundation’s nearly two decades of filings were the result of a “clerical error.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin

The falsehood: In written testimony, Mnuchin denied that his former bank had used so-called “robo-signing” to improperly foreclose on homeowners. “OneWest Bank did not ‘robo-sign’ documents,” Mnuchin wrote.

The truth: As the Columbus Dispatch detailed, OneWest Bank employees frequently signed documents in bulk without proper review, which is what robo-signing is. One employee testified that she typically signed about 750 foreclosure documents per week. The Dispatch noted that a judge stopped three OneWest Bank foreclosures “specifically based on inaccurate robo-signings.” Reuters also detailed the bank’s robo-signing back in 2011.

Mnuchin’s response: A spokesman offered the following statement after the Dispatch‘s story: “The media is picking on a hard-working bank employee whose reputation has been maligned but whose work has been upheld by numerous courts all around the country in the face of scurrilous and false allegations.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price

The falsehood: During his confirmation hearings, Price insisted that the discount he got on a biotech stock was “available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.”

The truth: As the Wall Street Journal reported, fewer than 20 investors in the U.S. were offered the discount, including Price.

Price’s response: Price did not respond to the Journal’s story.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions

The falsehood: Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asked Sessions whether “anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.”

Session responded: “Sen. Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

The truth: Yes, he did.

Sessions’ response: His office’s first statement: “I never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false.”

An anonymous White House official gave a New York Times reporter a different take, saying Sessions and the ambassador did talk and “had superficial comments about election-related news.”

Sessions’ spokeswoman later said Sessions often spoke with “foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee.” Washington Post reporters asked all 26 members of the committee if they spoke to the Russian ambassador in 2016. Sessions was the only one.

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These 5 Trump Cabinet Members Have Made False Statements to Congress

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Swamp Watch – 5 December 2016

by Paulette23A Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has chosen Ben Carson as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Why? He’s not remotely qualified for the position and he’s publicly (!) stated that he doesn’t have the experience to lead a government agency. Still, Carson is black and the U in HUD stands for Urban, and that’s probably enough for Trump.

Does this sound unbearably smug and elitist? Sure, I’ll cop to that. But as near as I can tell, Trump has already picked a Defense Secretary solely on the strength of the fact that his nickname is “Mad Dog,” and a UN ambassador because she looks kind of foreign. So it fits.

By the way, you’ll notice that in my table below I’ve finally decided to label Mnuchin and Ross as part of the swamp. My original hesitation was because they weren’t part of DC politics. Does Wall Street count as part of the swamp? Upon reflection, of course it does. Hell, Mnuchin even comes from Goldman Sachs. If that’s not part of the swamp, what is?

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Swamp Watch – 5 December 2016

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Donald Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Lie

by NoeliaFisher Posted on September 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I come bearing good news. But first, we have to get a little technical. I promise it won’t hurt a bit.

Many corporations are “pass-through” entities. Mostly these are partnerships and small businesses, and they aren’t taxed on their profits. Instead, the profits are passed through to the business owners, who pay ordinary personal income tax on it. Donald Trump, for example, owns hundreds of separate businesses under the umbrella of the Trump Organization, and most of them are pass-throughs. All the profits go to Trump.

So how should these businesses be handled? In the tax proposal Trump unveiled last year, pass-throughs would be taxed at a low 15 percent rate. This is a huge tax cut for rich business owners—like Donald Trump—since their personal tax rate can be as high as 33 percent. A corporate rate of 15 percent combined with a zero percent personal rate represents a huge tax cut.

But that was then. Earlier this week Trump unveiled a shiny new tax plan. How does it handle pass-throughs? As usual, details are hard to come by in Trumpland, but he told the Tax Foundation that he had decided to eliminate the tax cut. They took him at his word and concluded that his new tax plan would cost $4.4 trillion.

But Trump told the National Federation of Independent Business that he was keeping the tax cut. They also took him at his word and gave him their support. So which is it? Binyamin Appelbaum investigates:

Call it the trillion-dollar lie: Both assertions cannot be true.

….Steven Mnuchin, Mr. Trump’s finance chairman, said Friday that the campaign’s tax plan had not changed at any point on Thursday….“The intent of the plan is that big and small businesses have tax relief,” he said. He declined to comment on the conflicting accounts provided by the two groups.

So what’s the good news in all this? Here it is: Appelbaum called it a lie. That may be a bit rude, but it’s the most accurate way of characterizing what happened. Trump has been working on this plan for months and clearly has some idea of exactly how he plans to handle pass-through businesses. But he told business owners one thing and a tax scoring group another. What else would you call this?

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Donald Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Lie

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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

by GilbertDowney Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has slammed Washington insiders, lobbyists, and Wall Street as he has tapped populist anger to snag the Republican presidential nomination. Yet when it came time to pick the top money man for his campaign, he turned to a hedge-funder best known for running a bank that made billions off taxpayer bailouts and, by one account, cost the federal government $13 billion.

On Thursday, Trump named Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner and a hedge-fund boss from Los Angeles, as his national campaign finance chairman. Mnuchin has worked with many of Wall Street’s biggest firms, but he is perhaps best known for his leadership in organizing the takeover of IndyMac’s failed subprime mortgage business in 2009. Mnuchin organized a team of billionaires to buy the California-based bank’s assets from the FDIC after the government insurance fund had taken over the bank. Mnuchin’s group paid roughly $1.55 billion and received a promise from the FDIC to cover a portion of the losses on bad loans within the IndyMac pool. The FDIC’s losses on these assets have since ballooned to an estimated $13 billion.

The FDIC took on most of the risk, but Mnuchin and his partners, who named their new bank OneWest, ended up doing spectacularly well. They parlayed their $1.55 billion investment into a $3.4 billion payday last year, when Mnuchin engineered the sale of OneWest to another California bank, CIT. Along the way, OneWest issued more than $2 billion worth of dividends to shareholders. The tremendous profits the bank made, with taxpayers on the hook for IndyMac’s bad bets, raised eyebrows across the industry.

OneWest’s owners got a great deal when they bought IndyMac’s failed business from the FDIC (with a hefty dose of risk protection, care of US taxpayers), but the bank has not been lenient with homeowners who have found themselves in financial trouble. In fact, OneWest was targeted by regulators, who found the bank was unrepentant in the face of questioning. In one investigation of predatory loan practices, OneWest was the only bank that refused to settle. The bank also was the target of angry homeowners who filed lawsuits around the country that accused the bank of being overly aggressive in foreclosing. In one notable 2009 case that turned into a cause celebre for opponents of predatory loan practices, a Minnesota woman found herself locked out of her mother’s house in the middle of a blizzard after OneWest took the house and changed the locks while still in negotiations to refinance the home.

Mnuchin’s record seems at odds with Trump’s purported populism. When it comes to fundraising, it appears Trump is hardly an unconventional candidate: It’s the money that matters.

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Trump’s New Finance Chair Led a Bank That Made Millions Off Taxpayer Bailouts

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