MarketWatch: Opinion: Mnuchin can't stand up to his boss -- and it's costing you money

[Algernon Moncrieff]

TIM MULLANEY

Imagine missing Donald Regan, President Reagan’s famously irascible Treasury secretary, on Christmas Eve. Imagine spending a morning normally devoted to preparing to mark the birth of a savior brushing up on the exact requirements of the 25th Amendment for removing a president of the United States from office.

But that’s what I did, as more of your retirement money and mine was flushed down the toilet, courtesy of current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s utterly inexplicable decision this weekend to weigh in publicly on big U.S. banks’ ability to withstand a run that literally no one had said was happening, as part of a panicking administration’s unwillingness to tell President Donald Trump “no” about anything.

“I’ve got fuck-you money,” said Regan, reportedly. “Anytime I want, I’m gone.”

Which Mnuchin might have recalled when he tweeted about whether the president could, or would, fire the nominally independent Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell for raising interest rates faster than Trump would like. Or before he got the bright idea to call the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks to ask whether a perfectly routine stock-market correction would force them to cut off credit to a $20 trillion economy by this morning. And to tweet about that, too, in a move that will, one predicts, quickly be traced either to an edict from the boss or a misplaced desire to dance as fast as Mnuchin can to placate Trump.

[Iliyah]

1. He is afraid of that "tweet" bashing . . .