Trump’s Treasury Secretary: Expanding Lending is ‘No. 1 Priority’

President-Elect Donald Trump has named Steven Mnuchin — a Hollywood producer, Wall Street investor, and former Goldman Sachs chief information officer — as his nomination for Treasury Secretary, and Mnuchin already identified expanding lending as his “number one priority on the regulatory side,” he told CNBC Wednesday.

“The number one problem with Dodd-Frank is, it’s way too complicated and it cuts back lending. So we want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevents banks from lending,” Mnuchin said. “We have been in the business of regional banking and we understand what it is to make loans. And that’s the engine of growth to small and medium size businesses.”

While Mnuchin’s experience is rooted in mortgage finance, a credit finance trade association spokesman told Auto Finance News this is a positive development for auto finance because under the current rules of Dodd-Frank “the industry is just not clear” on which regulations to follow.  

However, critics of his appointment have specifically noted his history in the mortgage finance sector following the great recession. His hedge fund Dune Capital Management bought the bankrupt housing lender IndyMac back in 2009 from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, The New York TImes reports. He then rebuilt the company under the name OneWest Bank and sold it at a huge profit.

Given Mnuchin’s “history of profiting off the victims of predatory lending, I look forward to asking him how his Treasury department would work for Americans who are still waiting for the economic recovery to show up in their communities,” said Ron Wyden, senator of Oregon and the top democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, in a statement.

Although he has donated to democratic campaigns in the past, including to the next Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama, his publicly stated policies on tax cuts and regulation are very much in line with republican leadership in congress.

“Sustained 3%-to-4% GDP growth,” is another “number one priority” Mnuchin stated in an interview to Fox Business Network. He also supports a 15% top corporate tax rate, down from 35% today.