Is there any limit to his ambitions?
on Wall Street has long smoothed the path to the top job at America’s Treasury. Before he was the first treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton could boast, among other things, a role in establishing the Bank of New York, which is still in business. More recently, and somewhat less heroically, Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson both ran Goldman Sachs, a bank, before taking office. As its name suggests, the “revolving door” sends people in the other direction, too.
Now Steven Mnuchin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs who served as treasury secretary throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, has leapt back into the limelight. In 2021 he set up Liberty Strategic Capital, an investment firm. That much of the cash raised by Liberty came from sovereign-wealth funds in the Middle East raised some eyebrows. Until recently, the firm’s investments did not.
Before this flurry of high-profile dealmaking, the firm mainly invested in privately held cyber-security firms. Some of its bets look like duds. In 2021 Liberty invested $200m in Cybereason, valuing the firm at $2.7bn. After plans to list its shares were shelved, Cybereason’s next capital raise in 2023 implied a valuation of just $575m, according to PitchBook, a data provider.
Mr Mnuchin has experience of investing in banking. In 2009 he led a group of investors that purchased IndyMac, a casualty of the global financial crisis, before offloading it in 2015. As part of’s $1bn capital raise, Joseph Otting, who served as a senior Treasury official responsible for bank supervision during the Trump administration, has been appointed as the firm’s chief executive. Meanwhile, Liberty stumped up $450m of the cash.
Mr Mnuchin’s background could also become a source of discomfort. As treasury secretary, he chaired the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the country’s watchdog screening inbound investment, playing a crucial role in an earlier attempt by Mr Trump to force the divestment of TikTok. To some his acquisition of the social-media app would represent everything wrong with the revolving door.
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