STEVE MNUCHIN: IS HE DUMB OR A GREAT LIAR?

I don't know about our Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin.  If you look at his history, you would think he knows a lot about the stock market, but it sure isn't visible.  It is true, however, he has specialized in mortgages, especially distressed mortgages,* and not so much on stocks.  Frankly, he seems either dumb or a great liar.

In 1965 I went to Japan for 12 wks.  People were very nice, but sometimes we would be sort of milling around and someone would come up to me and would say "Don't worry."  I grew to understand that, if I wasn't worrying, I should be.

Mnuchin knew what he was doing when he sounded the alarm by saying banks had plenty of liquidity.  To me and plenty of others, it sounded like my experience in Japan that if you weren't worried you should be.  He should know that no one had reason to worry about the banks during the fall of the stock market, but he had to come out to say that banks have plenty of liquidity

Mnuchin tweeted late Sunday afternoon that he’d called the chief executive officers of the nation’s six largest banks and that those chiefs “confirmed they have ample liquidity available for lending to consumer, business markets, and all other market operations.” Those banks all have liquidity coverage ratios -- a measure of unencumbered high-quality assets that can easily be converted into cash -- that exceed 115 percent, more than the 100 percent required by Basel III rules.**

Manchin has also expressed concern about the stock markets falling steeply in December while the economy is so good.  Surely he really knows that the stock markets aren't concerned about today. Stock markets are concerned about tomorrow, and all the current confusion over tariffs, Trump's attacks on the head of the Federal Reserve, etc., makes tomorrow look awfully uncertain.  It is not a surprise the markets are falling steeply.  Normally the stock markets don't pay much attention to government shutdowns, but this one just adds to the overall uncertainty.  Of course, he must know this and just joined the liar corps.

* OneWest was profitable one year after Mnuchin had bought it, and it became the largest bank of Southern California, with assets worth $27 billion.\\
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OneWest was criticized for aggressively foreclosing on homeowners. The high foreclosure rate might have been a result of the loss sharing agreement with the FDIC, whereby the FDIC had to reimburse OneWest for losses.[11] According to The New York Times, OneWest "was involved in a string of lawsuits over questionable foreclosures, and settled several cases for millions of dollars".[36] Because of these foreclosures, around 100 protesters of Occupy Los Angeles gathered outside Mnuchin's home in October 2011 and held signs that read "Make Banks Pay".[21] Two California fair-housing groups filed complaints to the federal government alleging that OneWest violated the Fair Housing Act by not lending money to African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.[28][30][37]

In November 2016, after OneWest was sold to CIT, the California Reinvestment Coalition submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to learn more about CIT's reverse mortgage subsidiary, Financial Freedom.[37] According to the HUD's response, CIT/Financial Freedom foreclosed on 16,220 federally insured reverse mortgages from April 2009 to April 2016. This represented about 39% of all federally insured reverse mortgage foreclosures during that time. CRC estimated that Financial Freedom only serviced about 17% of the market and thus was foreclosing more than twice as often as its competitors.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Mnuchin)
** https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-24/bank-liquidity-never-a-question-despite-mnuchin-s-tweet-chart