Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and multi-millionaire investment banker Steven Mnuchin announced yesterday that he’s organizing a group of investors to buy the social media app TikTok, after the House passed a bill that would force the company to either separate from its Chinese parent company ByteDance or be banned from use in the United States.
On CNBC, Mnuchin also commented on the current U.S. economy and said: “The deficit is out of control, the debt is too high.”
He added that when he was a cabinet member, “We had a pre-COVID debt that we were beginning to pay down.”
Today on CNBC, Steven Mnuchin: “We had a debt pre-COVID that we were beginning to pay down.”
Once again, complete fiction. https://t.co/ENG01rJJIv pic.twitter.com/m1oTB79yOJ
— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) March 14, 2024
Steve Rattner, CEO of Willett Advisors, the private investment firm that manages billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s personal and philanthropic assets, objects to Mnuchin’s claims which he referred to as “complete fiction.”
Rattner wrote on X: “Trump claims that, before Covid, America was ‘going to start to pay off’ its debt. In reality, he added $4.8T (net of tariff revenues) to the debt before the pandemic, and $3.6T during it.”
In January 2021, Newsweek reported: “When Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the national debt stood at about $19.9 trillion. As he leaves office this month, the national debt has grown to about $27.7 trillion. That’s an increase of 39.2 percent.”
Also contradicting both Mnuchin and Trump, former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley brought up the debt issue repeatedly on the campaign trail, part of a strategy that showed Trump to be vulnerable among some Republicans when she started to win 20-40% of primary votes in some states.