Economic apocalypse brought Mnuchin (ex-Goldman Sachs partner and Treasury Secretary) back to banking. In the summer of 2008 he was in his office in New York when he saw a TV news shot of customers lined up outside a branch of IndyMac, a California bank, trying to pull out their money. Recalling the lessons of the savings and loan crisis, he told a colleague: “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it. … I’ve seen this game before.”
The bank collapsed on July 11, followed that autumn by the near destruction of the entire financial system. At one of the murkiest moments of the crisis, Mnuchin gathered some billionaire allies, including Soros and hedge fund manager John Paulson, and assembled a $1.6 billion bid to buy IndyMac. Mnuchin got an agreement that guaranteed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would absorb almost all the loan losses after a certain threshold. He renamed the bank OneWest. Within a year, it was profitable. In October 2011 about 100 protesters marched on his Los Angeles mansion, angry about foreclosures. “Steve Mnuchin,” one sign read, “Stop taking our homes.” He and his partners sold the bank in August 2015 for $3.4 billion.
Richard LeFrak, a billionaire developer who’s friendly with Mnuchin and has known Trump for about half a century, says he isn’t sure if the two even have the same ideology. But he sees a through line in Mnuchin’s journey from Wall Street to Hollywood to bank ownership to politics. “He’s a guy that can recognize an opportunity and adapt to it,” he says. “He’s able to switch into different things.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-31/steven-mnuchin-businessweek
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