Mnuchin heat on
Critics see a Minister of Foreclosure
The housing crisis might not be over for Steve Mnuchin.
A leading Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday asked President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary to answer some questions about lending practices at OneWest Bank, which Mnuchin headed during the housing crisis.
OneWest had been targeted by housing advocates to explain thousands of foreclosures it executed during the financial meltdown.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown sent Mnuchin a letter asking him to detail his policies on lending discrimination, foreclosure-prevention programs, and on regulation of large banks in general.
“As chairman and CEO of a financial institution that has been labeled a ‘foreclosure machine,’ do you be- lieve the federal government should maintain its loss mitigation and foreclosure-prevention programs or not?” Brown asked in the letter.
While Mnuchin has long worked on Wall Street — at Goldman Sachs and at George Soros’ hedge fund — his role in buying failing mortgage lender IndyMac, which he turned into OneWest, has attracted the most intense scrutiny.
OneWest foreclosed on as many as 36,000 homeowners in California.
The bank used a government loss-sharing program, set up by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., to reap more than $1 billion in profits, according to the California Reinvestment Coalition, which obtained payment records through the Freedom of Information Act.
Brown’s letter is the latest attempt by Democrats to bring up Mnuchin’s role in profiting off the housing crisis. The ranking Democrat on the Banking Committee, Brown was joined by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in bringing up his previous business dealings.
“Steve Mnuchin & OneWest Bank swooped in after the 2008 crash & aggressively — & sometimes illegally — foreclosed on people’s homes,” Warren wrote on Twitter earlier this month.