Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortune of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.<\/p>\n
While employed at Goldman<\/a>, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As Zero Hedge readers are familiar<\/a>, Trump often critized his main competitor Ted Cruz for his links to the bank because of loans used to finance Cruz\u2019s Senate campaign, and because Heidi Cruz was a one-time employee of Goldman. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,\u201d <\/strong>Trump said in one debate.<\/p>\n He had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him.<\/p>\n In addition to Goldman, Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management, whose founder, George Soros, has funded many left-leaning causes. Where it gets even more bizarre is that Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats<\/a>, including to Clinton and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin is part of a group of businesspeople Trump has excoriated. In August, Trump said hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder” as he touted his proposal to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which gives private equity and hedge fund managers preferential tax treatment.<\/p>\n “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said at the time on CBS’ Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” he said. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them\u2014they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous.”<\/p>\n They apparently are also very good at raising money.<\/p>\n Some more on Mnuchin’s background: starting his career in the early 1980s as a trainee at Salomon Brothers before moving to Goldman Sachs in 1985, Mnuchin was front and center for the advent of instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. He has called securitization \u201can extremely positive development in terms of being able to finance different parts of the economy and different businesses efficiently.\u201d <\/strong>The pitfalls of the financing method came later, he’s said.<\/p>\n Mnuchin’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was a partner at Goldman Sachs in the 1960s. The second-youngest of five siblings, Steven attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School and then Yale University, where his roommate was Edward Lampert, who would go on to become a hedge-fund manager and owner of Sears.<\/p>\n More recently, in October 2014 Mnuchin became co-chairman of the board of the Hollywood studio Relativity Media due to Dune’s fascination with movies. Dune has provided financing for batches of winning movies, like the \u201cX-Men\u201d franchise and \u201cAvatar,\u201d Hollywood\u2019s all-time box-office champion.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/user5\/imageroot\/2016\/04\/20\/munchin.jpg\")
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