by Nomad
If you -or somebody you know- happened to be one of the thousands of victims of home foreclosure in the wake of the economic meltdown of 2008, here's why Donald Trump's choice for his finance manager, Steven Mnuchin, is a slap in your face.
In fact, all Americans ought to be furious.
Trump's Wall Street Hypocrisy
Days after locking up the Republican presidential nomination in May, Donald Trump named Steven Mnuchin as his national finance chairman.
The press release states that Mnuchin "has previously worked with Mr. Trump in a business capacity and brings his expertise in finance to what will be an extremely successful fundraising operation for the Republican Party."
In many ways, it was a bewildering and disturbing choice for a candidate who had consistently portrayed himself - to his angry middle-class supporters- as a bitter foe of Wall Street excesses.
Indeed, Wall Street once trembled at the possibility of Trump getting the nomination. Months before, in September 2015, one political strategist put it like this :
"He has bought into the populist rhetoric that Wall Street is greedy and makes too much money...He sounds more anti-Wall Street than Elizabeth Warren."
That was, of course, before Trump was officially crowned the Republican nominee. After the GOP nomination was sealed up, Trump surprised everybody by jumping in bed with the very people he had castigated.
Goldman, Sachs in the Mnuchin Bloodline
After all, Mnuchin's connections to Wall Street are practically genetic. His father, Robert E. Mnuchin, spent a greater part of three decades on Wall Street at Goldman, Sachs & Company. He was, in fact, one of the pioneers of the institutional equity trading business in the 1960's. Before his retirement in 1990, Robert Mnuchin was "one of the most important figures in the equities business."
(Incidentally, Investopedia cites a crash in equity trading as major factors in two periods of economic decline, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008.)
