First Steven Mnuchin bought into NYCB, now he wants TikTok

Time served 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. Mr Rubin went on to hold senior positions at Citigroup, another bank. Cerberus Capital Management and Warburg Pincus, two investment firms, are chaired by John Snow and Timothy Geithner respectively.

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. But this month Liberty led the capital raise by New York Community Bank (NYCB) after losses relating to the bank’s property loans caused its shares to tank. That deal closed on March 11th. Three days later Mr Mnuchin told CNBC that he was trying to buy TikTok after America’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would force its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the social-media app or face a ban in America.