The Search for America’s Next Treasury Secretary is On
If the President is America’s CEO, the CFO is the Treasury Secretary. Soon, the country will have a new one in its metaphorical c-suite.
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If the President is America’s CEO, the CFO is the Treasury Secretary. Come early next year, the country will have a new one in its metaphorical c-suite.
Charged with leading the department that oversees national banks, pays the government’s bills, collects taxes through the IRS, and manages the cash available to markets, the next secretary will immediately become one of the most influential figures on the planet, their every word pored over by analysts and traders. Here’s who President-elect Donald Trump is eyeing for the job.
Billionaires Billionaires Billionaires
Leading Trump’s transition team are two billionaires: Howard Lutnick, the CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, and Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. McMahon, who served in the first Trump administration as director of the Small Business Administration, is considered a possible Commerce Secretary, while Lutnick has an outside shot at Treasury himself.
But early word from inside Mar-a-Lago suggests two other billionaires, both hedge fund managers, are the leading candidates. Paulson & Co.’s John Paulson, who has been publicly salivating for the job and who Trump has reportedly considered for months, has advocated for tariffs on imports, a key campaign pledge. Key Square’s Scott Bessent, while a more traditional market conservative, also embraced the tariff proposal during the campaign — and he had a “very positive” meeting with Trump on Friday, sources told Reuters. Whoever gets the job will have a clear set of near-term priorities, and — if past is prologue — a bit more stability than is afforded to other Trump appointees:
- The Treasury post was the most stable cabinet position during the president-elect’s first term. Investment banker Steve Mnuchin — also a film producer who helped finance “The Lego Batman Movie” — held the post for nearly four years and helped push through the 2017 tax cuts that lowered most individual income brackets and set a flat corporate tax rate of 21%.
- The individual tax cuts are set to expire next year, so a key job for the next Secretary will be working with the White House and Congress to fulfill Trump’s pledges to extend them and cut corporate taxes to 15%. They’ll also likely be called in to advise on the aforementioned tariffs: Trump promised a 60% duty on goods from China and 10% from everywhere else, which experts say could raise prices for consumers.
Getting Moody: Moody’s, the last of the three major US credit ratings agencies to maintain a top rating for the US government, warned that “in the absence of policy measures to help limit fiscal deficits” the new economic policies could send debt levels skyrocketing. To that end, Trump surrogate Elon Musk, another billionaire, said he’d help the administration cut hundreds of billions in spending, which experts have also raised concerns about. Paulson, meanwhile, said he’d gladly work with Musk if picked.