On the recordFebruary 13, 2017
I rise today to join a chorus of my colleagues in speaking out against the nomination of Steven Mnuchin to serve as Secretary of the Department of the Treasury. What I believe is, if you look at Mr. Mnuchin's record, he has spent a lot of time benefiting from--in fact, even exploiting--families who are struggling homeowners in my State. I would like to read into the Record a report by NPR from November of last year which makes his pattern stunningly clear. During the depths of the financial crisis, Mnuchin was looking to make profits from the ruins of the housing bust. In 2009, he put together a group of billionaire investors and bought a failed California-based bank called IndyMac. It had been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after its sketchy mortgage loans went seriously bad. Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac on the condition that the FDIC agree to pay future losses above a certain threshold. They renamed the bank OneWest Bank, and after running it for 6 years, they sold it last year for a profit, estimated at close to $1.5 billion. Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, a housing advocacy group, says that profit was made on the backs of suffering Californian homeowners. This is not in the text here, but homeowners who were suffering from a massive mortgage collapse that was created in many ways or stimulated by the greed and avarice of bad actors.…
