Dr. Josef Ackermann, Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus Group, Congratulates Wilbur Ross on Nomination

Commenting on the nomination of the Bank of Cyprus Group's Vice-Chairman Wilbur Ross to the position of United States Secretary of Commerce in President-elect Trump's cabinet, Dr. Josef Ackermann, Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus Group, said:

"We congratulate Wilbur Ross on his nomination to the post of United States Secretary of Commerce. Having worked closely with Wilbur on the Board of the Bank of Cyprus Group over the past couple of years and seen, first hand, his tremendous contribution to the successful turnaround of the Group, I am confident that President-elect Trump has made an excellent choice."

ORIGINAL APA-OTS TEXT - THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PRESS RELEASE IS SUBJECT TO THE EXCLUSIVE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ISSUER | PRN0018 </s> Trump Taps Billionaire Investor Wilbur Ross For Commerce Secretary

Enlarge this image toggle caption Evan Vucci/AP Evan Vucci/AP

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Wilbur Ross Jr., a billionaire investor and turnaround specialist, as his commerce secretary.

Ross announced his selection Wednesday during a joint CNBC interview with longtime Wall Street banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump's pick for Treasury secretary.

"Wilbur Ross is a champion of American manufacturing and knows how to help companies succeed," Trump said in a statement announcing his choice.

"Wilbur knows that cutting taxes for working families, reducing burdensome government regulations and unleashing America's energy resources will strengthen our economy at a time when our country needs to see significant growth."

Ross, 79, is a donor and longtime associate of Trump's, having helped him resurrect his casino company after it went bankrupt in the early 1990s.

Over the years, Ross has grown rich by buying troubled companies in industries such as steel, textiles, auto parts and coal and restructuring them, often with significant layoffs and budget cuts. He is said by Forbes to be worth $2.9 billion, making him the country's 232nd richest person.

In 2002, he cobbled together several troubled steel companies to create the International Steel Group. He later sold the company to Mittal Steel in the Netherlands.

As The New York Times reported, "Some businesses where he has invested, like textile mills, have struggled. But other investments have salvaged industry and jobs while providing a lucrative payday."

In 2008, Ross told NPR's Steve Inskeep:

"One of the problems with industries that have been in relatively long-term declines is that very often, the managements in those industries develop a kind of loser mentality. And when you ask them what's wrong with the business, they'll point to extraneous forces. "It'll be the fault of the unions, or it'll be the fault of China or the fault of the government or the fault of the class-action people. So rather than dealing with the things that may be within their own control, they kind of sit around sulking about things that are fundamentally out of their control."

Ross is the chairman and chief strategy officer, as well as the founder, of the private equity firm WL Ross and Co. He later sold the company to Invesco but is still involved with it.

Among the darker chapters in his career was his involvement with the Sago Mine in West Virginia. Shortly after his company purchased the mine, an explosion there killed 12 miners.

A former Democrat, Ross has been a loyal Trump supporter who shares his skepticism about trade agreements and said in a June interview with CNBC that the U.S. needs a "more radical, new approach to government."

His second of three wives was former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, who authored several articles widely thought to have helped kill off Hillary Clinton's attempt at health care reform in the 1990s.

In Wednesday's statement, Trump also announced that he's selected Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Ricketts for the job of deputy commerce secretary. </s> Video: Analyst: Wilbur Ross and Steven Mnuchin are relatively safe Trump choices

President-elect Donald Trump picks ex-Goldman Sachs Steven Mnuchin to lead the U.S. Treasury Department and billionaire Wilbur Ross for the Commerce, and Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief, says an analyst. Bobbi Rebell reports. </s> Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross is President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Commerce secretary, two sources tell CNN.

The nomination is expected to be rolled out as part of an economic team announcement on Wednesday, when Trump will likely name Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary.

The Cabinet-level position, which requires Senate confirmation, serves as the government's chief business advocate. The Commerce secretary is a liaison between companies and the White House. Ross could play a key role in what are expected to be Trump's signature economic policy issues like trade and jobs.

Ross, 79, fits the type of administration official Trump pledged to appoint during the campaign: businessmen with long resumes at the ready to negotiate for U.S. interests around the world.

As a vocal Trump supporter before the election, Ross cited the need for a "more radical, new approach to government" that would help middle class and lower middle class Americans.

Ross, chairman of WL Ross & Co., has made a career of resurrecting dying companies. Fittingly, some of Ross's biggest hits have been in the same demoralized industries that Trump wants to revive: steel and coal.

For instance, Ross's firm scored huge returns last decade by cobbling together bankrupt steel makers including Bethlehem Steel to form International Steel Group. Ross then flipped the conglomerate in a $4.5 billion sale two years later.

Ross's foray into the coal industry, however, ran into trouble in January 2006 when 12 miners were killed after an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. His company, the International Coal Group, had taken over the mine a couple months earlier.

According to federal reports, the mine had recorded 96 safety violations in 2005 that were deemed "serious and substantial." The mine was fined nearly $134,000, an amount later reduced in court.

Ross, a New Jersey native, has amassed a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth nearly $3 billion. He's used some of that money to build an impressive art collection worth a reported $150 million.

In addition to chairing his equity fund, Ross also sits on a number of boards of directors, including for the Bank of Cyprus, where he is vice chairman; Arcelor Mittal, a steel giant; Sun Bancorp, a bank holding compnay; and Exco Resources, a natural gas and oil exploration company.

Like Trump, who famously called himself the "king of debt," Ross is not afraid to borrow money. Ross frequently used debt to finance his acquisitions, a tactic known as a leveraged buyout.

Carl Icahn, another billionaire backer of Trump, said on Twitter before the announcement that Ross is one of the "smartest people I know" and would be a "great" choice to lead the Commerce Department.

Should Ross be confirmed, he would take over for Penny Pritzker, who has held the job under President Obama since 2013. And his policies would likely represent a 180-degree departure from Pritzker's Commerce Department.

Pritzker strongly supported free trade and has traveled to 38 countries during her tenure. She advocated clean energy partnerships and the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, both of which Donald Trump campaigned hard against.

Ross has been a vocal critic of free trade deals.

"Free trade is like free lunch: There is no free lunch," Ross told Fox Business in August. "Somebody wins and somebody loses. And unfortunately, we've been losing with these stupid agreements that we've made."

The Commerce Department includes the International Trade Administration, which enforces the nation's trade agreements.

Whoever is chosen as commerce secretary will likely continue many of the policies that Pritzker and the Obama administration held dear.

Pritzker supported public-private partnerships to build up American manufacturing industries. Many businesses -- notably For (F)-- have recently opted to keep some of their plants open in the United States as a result of those initiatives.

Other important agencies fall under the Commerce Department, including the National Weather Service, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency that tracks economic growth, the trade surplus or deficit and other important economic measures.

The new secretary will also oversee the 2020 national census. The census is critical for understanding the scope of poverty and underserved communities across the country. It is also the basis for adjusting the number of congressional districts in each state, which determines presidential electoral votes.

--CNNMoney's Jill Disis and David Goldman contributed to this story. </s> (JTA) — Trump campaign finance chief Steve Mnuchin confirmed that President-elect Donald Trump has selected him to serve as Treasury secretary.

Mnuchin made the announcement during an early morning CNBC interview appearing with billionaire investor Wilbur Ross Jr., who has been nominated as Commerce secretary.

Mnuchin, 53, who is Jewish, made his fortune as a banker for Goldman Sachs, and has also helmed smaller banks and also produced the blockbuster films “Avatar” and the “X-Men,” among others.

Multiple media outlets, including Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post, said in alerts posted late Tuesday that Mnuchin was Trump’s Treasury pick.

Mnuchin, who backed Mitt Romney in the 2012 election and joined the Trump campaign in April, was among the earliest of Republican establishment figures to support Trump’s insurgent campaign for the party’s nomination. His father is the noted art dealer Robert Mnuchin, who also made his fortune at Goldman Sachs. </s> Wilbur Ross, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Commerce secretary, told Finance Minister Taro Aso of his interest in strengthening bilateral economic ties in a letter personally delivered by a representative in Tokyo on Thursday.

According to a source who sat in on the meeting at the Finance Ministry between Aso and a delegation representing Ross, a private equity investor who has had extensive business dealings in Japan, the letter included Ross’ view that Japan-U.S. cooperation is important.

The source said Ross’ representative and Aso exchanged views on the Trump administration’s likely economic policies and the Japanese government’s Abenomics economic and fiscal policy package.

Another member of the delegation, identifying himself as a financial adviser to Ross, told Kyodo News after the meeting that Ross is “very supportive of Japan.”

Ross and Aso had apparently planned a face-to-face meeting in Japan before Ross’ nomination prompted him to cancel the trip.

The letter follows Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s meeting with Trump in November at Trump’s residence in New York. Neither side revealed much about the content of the meeting, with Abe saying only he came away from the talks feeling he can build a relationship of trust with the president-elect.

Ross has long been a proponent of free trade but has criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact inked between Japan, the United States and 10 other Pacific Rim nations in February.

While Abe continues to encourage Japan’s ratification process and push for all signatories to remain committed to the deal, Trump has pledged to pull the United States out as soon as he takes office on Jan. 20.

Ross told a U.S. television channel Wednesday that the TPP is “not going to happen.”

“The TPP does not exist. It’s a fiction in most people’s minds at this point,” he told Fox Business, adding he agrees with Trump’s stance that the United States should instead work on bilateral deals.

Ross has a history of investing in distressed assets. His dealings in Japan have included the purchase and restructuring of Kofuku Bank, an Osaka-based regional bank that had been placed under state control after collapsing in 1999.

He is also the chairman of the Japan Society, a New York-based nonprofit organization that promotes relations between Japan and the United States.

The Japanese government awarded Ross with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, in 2014, for his efforts in advancing cultural exchanges and strengthening bilateral ties. </s> President-elect Donald Trump appeared to be focusing on core economic issues in his emerging Cabinet on Wednesday, while he prepared to step aside from his sprawling businesses.

Trump officially announced key members of his economic team, choosing former banker and Hollywood financier Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary and billionaire industrialist Wilbur Ross to run the Commerce Department. As Ross’s deputy, Trump turned to Chicago Cubs co-owner Todd Rickets, whose family are powerful conservative donors.

“This team will be instrumental in implementing the President-elect’s America First economic plan that will create more than 25 million jobs over the next decade,” Trump’s transition team said in statement.

The economic focus came as Trump’s advisers continued promoting his role in a deal with air-conditioning manufacturer Carrier, which has announced it would reverse plans to move one of its factories from Indiana to Mexico. The company, owned by United Technologies, said about 1,000 U.S. jobs would be preserved. Trump’s promise to keep jobs in the United States and rebuild American manufacturing was a core part of his insurgent campaign.

“The Carrier deal, I think it’s terrific,” Mnuchin told reporters as he walked into Manhattan’s Trump Tower Wednesday morning to meet with his future boss. He said Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence had “picked up the phone and called the CEO of the United Technologies and told them we want to keep jobs here. Can’t remember the last time a president did that.”

Details of the deal remained unclear, including the extent of Trump’s personal involvement versus Pence or other officials, and whether any incentives were offered to keep the jobs in the state, where Pence is the governor.

Also uncertain were the specifics of how Trump, a longtime real estate developer with interests around the globe, planned to step away from overseeing his business. Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that he would soon leave the conglomerate.

“I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Twitter, which has remained his favorite communication medium during the transition.

The announcement, seen as a response to increasingly voiced concerns about the potential conflicts of interest between Trump’s public and private roles, marks a turn from his months-long refusal to distance himself from his private affairs while holding the nation’s highest public office.

But Trump did not say if the new arrangement would include a full sale of his stake or, as he has offered before, a ceding of company management to his children, which ethics advisers have said would not resolve worries that the business could still influence his decisions in the Oval Office.

Presidents are not bound by the strict conflict-of-interest laws governing most U.S. elected officials. But most modern presidents have agreed to sell or sequester their assets in a “blind trust,” led by an independent manager with supreme control, in order to keep past business deals, investments and relationships from influencing their White House term.

Giving company management to his three eldest children - Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka - would still leave open the potential for Trump to make presidential decisions for their benefit. The children have already played a key part in Trump’s governing preparations, serving on the transition team now selecting key appointees and sitting in on meetings with foreign heads of state.

Mnuchin, an investor and former Goldman Sachs executive who joined Trump’s campaign in May as finance chairman, has no government experience. But in his statement announcing Mnuchin’s nomination, which is subject to Senate confirmation, Trump hailed the former private equity fund head as “a world-class financier, banker and businessman,” who has “played a key role in developing our plan to build a dynamic, booming economy that will create millions of jobs.”

Ross is an investor known as the “king of bankruptcy” for buying beaten-down companies with the potential to deliver profits. He helped shape the Trump campaign’s economic agenda, particularly its hard-line stance on the need to renegotiate or withdraw from free trade agreements. That position resonated with the working class voters who were instrumental in delivering Trump’s upset victory.

Trump said that Ross, whose nomination is also subject to Senate confirmation, “is a champion of American manufacturing and knows how to help companies succeed. Most importantly, he is one of the greatest negotiators I have ever met.”

The two expressed confidence in the incoming administration’s ability to boost economic growth as high as 4 percent a year.

Crucial to that projection would be passage of Trump’s proposed overhaul of the tax code, including streamlining individual tax rates into three brackets and reducing the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. Independent research groups have estimated the plan could cost as much as $6 trillion over the next decade. However, that analysis does not include the potential economic benefits the tax cuts could generate.

Trump’s new team spread out to give a sales pitch on Wednesday for his economic vision. In a joint interview with Ross on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Mnuchin said reforming the nation’s tax code would be Trump’s top priority and promised significant tax breaks for the middle class but no absolute cut for high-income households.

And at Trump Tower, Mnuchin told reporters that the new administration’s “number one priority is going to be the economy, get back to three to four percent growth. We believe that’s very sustainable.”

Asked how they would achieve Trump’s promise to convince U.S. companies to bring back massive amounts of cash they have stockpiled overseas because of what they see as high corporate taxes, Mnuchin said:” Well our first priority is going to be the tax plan and the tax plan has both the corporate aspects to it, lowering corporate taxes so we make U.S. companies the most competitive in the world.”

He added, without elaboration, that Trump will ensure that “we repatriate trillions of dollars back to the United States.”

Drew Harwell, Ylan Mui and Jim Tankersley contributed to this report. </s> When former President George W. Bush assembled his first Cabinet in 2001, news reports dubbed them a team of millionaires, and government watchdogs questioned whether they were out of touch with most Americans’ problems. Combined, that group had an inflation-adjusted net worth of about $250 million – which is roughly one-tenth the wealth of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary alone.

Trump is putting together what will be the wealthiest administration in modern American history. His announced nominees for top positions include several multimillionaires, an heir to a family megafortune and two Forbes-certified billionaires. Rumored candidates for other positions suggest that Trump could add more ultra-rich appointees soon.

Many of the Trump appointees were born wealthy, attended elite schools and went on to amass even larger fortunes as adults. As a group, they have much more experience funding political candidates than they do running government agencies.

Their collective wealth in many ways defies Trump’s populist campaign promises. Their business ties, particularly to Wall Street, have drawn rebukes from Democrats. But the group also amplifies Trump’s own campaign pitch: that Washington outsiders who know how to navigate and exploit a “rigged” system are best able to fix that system for the working class.

“It fits into Trump’s message that he’s trying to do business in an unusual way, by bringing in these outsiders,” said Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. But Trump and his team, she added, won’t be able to draw on the same sort of life struggles that President Barack Obama did, in crafting policy to lift poor and middle-class Americans.

“They’re just not going to have any access to that” life experience, she said. “I guess it will be a test – does empathy actually matter?”

Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary is industrialist Wilbur Ross, who has amassed a fortune of $2.5 billion through decades at the helm of Rothschild’s bankruptcy practice and his own investment firm, according to Forbes.

Ross’ would-be deputy at the Commerce Department, Todd Ricketts, is the son of a billionaire and the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs. Steven Mnuchin, who Trump named to head the Treasury Department, is a former Goldman Sachs executive, hedge fund executive and Hollywood financier.

Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire who was nominated as Trump’s education secretary, is the daughter of Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway. Her family has a net worth of $5.1 billion, according to Forbes. Elaine Chao, the choice for transportation secretary, is the daughter of a shipping magnate.

It is a group that has long spent big to influence politics. Mnuchin, Ross and DeVos each made hundreds of thousands of dollars of political contributions within the last two years, according to OpenSecrets.org. In Ross’ Manhattan office, next to a window overlooking Central Park, there is a table filled with pictures of himself with candidates to whom he has contributed, including John Boehner, Michael Bloomberg and Bill Clinton.

On Wednesday, Democrats seized on Ross’ and Mnuchin’s Wall Street ties to accuse Trump of undermining his populist pitch.

“I’m not shocked by this. It’s a billionaire president being surrounded by a billionaire and millionaire cabinet, with a billionaire agenda … to hurt the middle class,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. “The appointments suggest that he’s going to break his campaign promises.”

In their first interviews Wednesday after being unveiled as Cabinet nominees, Mnuchin and Ross pitched their business experience as beneficial to the goals of boosting workers.

“I think one of the good things about both Wilbur and I, we have actually been bankers,” Mnuchin told CNBC, adding, “We’ve been in the business of regional banking, and we understand what it means to make loans.”

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to lift up Americans who have seen their economic prospects dim with the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs. And indeed, voters by and large ignored Trump’s own opulence, which never became the baggage that it did for the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

Still, the question now is whether public officials who come from such privileged backgrounds will favor policies that benefit the rich.

“This isn’t a criticism or a conspiracy, … but it’s important to recognize that everyone’s perspective and policy and government is shaped by the kind of life you’ve lived,” said Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke University. “The research really says that when you put a bunch of millionaires in charge, you can expect public policy that helps millionaires at the expense of everybody else.”

Future appointments could further increase the wealth of Trump’s Cabinet. Harold Hamm – a self-made oil industry executive who ranks 30th on the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of $16.7 billion – is on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of energy. </s> WASHINGTON – A vocal critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement will be in charge of the U.S. commerce portfolio, with the nomination Wednesday of Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who condemns foreign sales taxes as a backdoor tariff on American goods.

The 79-year-old investor in manufacturing companies helped write Donald Trump’s trade platform – which accused U.S. trading partners of using value-added taxes as an economic weapon, to force American companies to move offshore.

Ross co-authored an economic policy paper that proposed renegotiating NAFTA and included a call for combating the use of foreign consumption taxes that render American-made goods less competitive. Trump echoed the paper’s views in campaign speeches.

The document argued that foreign countries offer a sales-tax rebate on their own goods shipped abroad, but then tax incoming products from the U.S., which does not have a value-added tax. The net effect, he said, is to invite U.S. companies to relocate.

Related: What happens when the walls go up?

“Like many countries, Mexico has shrewdly exploited the (value-added tax) backdoor tariff to further its competitive advantage,” Ross wrote in the 31-page pager, co-authored in September with University of California business professor Peter Navarro.

“It is thus not surprising that U.S. corporations want to move their factories offshore and then export their products back to the U.S.”

Ross is one of several billionaires nominated to the new Trump cabinet.

The latest additions to the administration on Wednesday included a treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who worked at Goldman Sachs and whom critics say was instrumental in introducing the creative debt-swapping instruments that contributed to the global financial crisis; and Ameritrade heir and Chicago Cubs owner Todd Ricketts, nominated as deputy commerce secretary.

Trump has yet to name the next U.S. trade representative – responsible for executing his promise to renegotiate or cancel NAFTA.

Yet some observers suggest he’s signalled his seriousness on trade by nominating a billionaire best known for buying struggling U.S. manufacturing companies, then either saving them, according to admirers, or brutally downsizing them, according to detractors.

One observer voiced both opinions of Ross.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of steel industries and the United Steelworkers union, told the Wall Street Journal: “There are lots of jobs (in the U.S.) that are here now that would have disappeared forever if not for his interventions. … But he’s like dealing with a trauma surgeon: He can keep you alive, but it will cost you your leg.”

Trump himself hinted Ross will be applying his negotiation skills.

“Wilbur Ross is a champion of American manufacturing and knows how to help companies succeed,” Trump said in a statement.

“Most importantly, he is one of the greatest negotiators I have ever met and that comes from me, the author of The Art of the Deal.”

It’s unclear how Canada fits into the complaints about NAFTA.

During the campaign, Trump almost never mentioned Canada. Ross did the same in the September paper he co-authored – it mentioned Mexico 10 times, and Canada just once, in passing, as one of the major countries contributing to the U.S. trade deficit.

A leading expert on international tax policy says Canada could be affected by the trade talk.

“I guess, probably, Canada should worry,” said Gary Hufbauer, a former U.S. federal official and now a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“If Canada loves its value-added tax, or its GST as they call it … that’s fine. That doesn’t bother Trump at all.” But when it’s applied to imports, Hufbauer said: “He sees it as a tariff when you levy it at the border.”

He said one of two things might happen: the U.S. will push for an end on tax rebates for products shipped into the U.S., or introduce its own rebates as suggested in a plan by Republican congressional leader Paul Ryan.

Hufbauer economists will conclude it’s no big deal – because currencies would adjust to the new reality and because Canada has a smaller trade surplus with the U.S. than Mexico, which would feel a deeper sting.

“It’s not a big concern for economists at the University of Toronto who are going to say the Canadian dollar is going to offset (this),” Hufbauer said.

“They’re going to go on TV and tell people not to worry. … But it’s a big concern for firms that (trade across the border).” </s> President-elect Donald Trump's selection for Treasury secretary says tax reform will be his top priority and promises the largest tax overhaul since the Reagan administration.

Steven Mnuchin made the pledge in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.

Mnuchin, a former Wall Street insider who ran an eclectic series of businesses before becoming a Hollywood producer, confirmed that he was Trump's pick for the Treasury job, which has vast responsibility for regulating the financial industry and oversees the IRS.

Mnuchin told CNBC he expects interest rates to stay relatively low for the next two years. He also said Janet Yellen has done a "good job" as Federal Reserve chair.

"I think the United States is the greatest country in the world to invest in," he said.

He also promised corporate tax cuts to "bring huge amounts of jobs back to the United States."

For individuals, he said any reductions in upper-income taxes would be "offset by less deductions that pay for it." He also said that a "big middle income tax cut" would be another part of the reform plan, adding that "taxes are way too complicated" and that people spend "way too much time worrying about ways to get them lower."

Wilbur Ross, a billionaire who has made a career of resurrecting dying companies, confirmed in the same interview that he is Trump's choice for commerce secretary, the face of American business around the world.

Related: Carrier says it has struck a deal with Trump to keep jobs in Indiana

Ross praised a deal with Trump announced Monday by Carrier, the air conditioner manufacturer, to keep nearly 1,000 jobs in Indiana rather than shipping them to Mexico.

"Here we have a trade victory before we've even come into office," he said.

Both Mnuchin and Ross would need to be confirmed by the Senate.

As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin would be the face of the American economy around the world. The job carries expansive responsibility, including managing the federal debt and overseeing Wall Street and the financial markets.

Mnuchin, like his father before him, was a partner at Goldman Sachs. He worked for the firm for 17 years, joining at age 22 and leaving just before his 40th birthday, in 2002.

He briefly joined the hedge fund of his former college roommate Eddie Lampert. Mnuchin still serves as a director of Sears Holding, (SHLD) of which Lampert is chairman and CEO.

After less than a year, he left Lampert to work as a portfolio manager for the hedge fund of George Soros, the billionaire financier who has bankrolled liberal candidates and causes -- and who was depicted as a villain in Trump's last campaign ad.

He only stayed a year, leaving in September 2004 to start his own hedge fund, Dune Capital Management.

As a producer, he has put out films including "American Sniper," "The Lego Movie" and this summer's "Suicide Squad." His latest film, which opened right before Thanksgiving, is called "Rules Don't Apply."

Mnuchin led the group that bought failed subprime lender IndyMac for pennies on the dollar in 2009, about a year after the FDIC took over the California bank following a run on deposits by customers.

IndyMac had become a poster child for the risky home loans that brought on the housing crisis and the meltdown in financial markets. The FDIC agreed to assume much of the losses as part of its sale to Mnuchin, who renamed it OneWest.

But regulators soon questioned OneWest's foreclosure practices, which included so-called robo-signings that pushed homeowners into foreclosure without proper review or due process.

The bank was one of many that agreed to pay millions in fines to compensate customers. Occupy Los Angeles protesters showed up at Mnuchin's Bel Air mansion. And this month, two fair housing groups in California filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, accusing the bank of discriminating against minority borrowers during his tenure there.

As commerce secretary, Ross would serve as the government's chief business advocate. The Commerce secretary is a liaison between companies and the White House. Ross could play a key role in what are expected to be Trump's signature economic policy issues like trade and jobs.

As a vocal Trump supporter before the election, Ross cited the need for a "more radical, new approach to government" that would help middle class and lower middle class Americans.

Ross is chairman of WL Ross & Co., which has specialized in reassembling dying companies. Fittingly, some of Ross's biggest hits have been in the same demoralized industries that Trump wants to revive: steel and coal.

For instance, Ross's firm scored huge returns last decade by cobbling together bankrupt steel makers including Bethlehem Steel to form International Steel Group. Ross then flipped the conglomerate in a $4.5 billion sale two years later.

Ross's foray into the coal industry, however, ran into trouble in January 2006 when 12 miners were killed after an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia. His company, the International Coal Group, had taken over the mine a couple months earlier.

According to federal reports, the mine had recorded 96 safety violations in 2005 that were deemed "serious and substantial." The mine was fined nearly $134,000, an amount later reduced in court.

Ross, a New Jersey native, has amassed a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth nearly $3 billion. He's used some of that money to build an impressive art collection worth a reported $150 million.
Trump intends to appoint billionaire Wilbur Ross as United States Secretary of Commerce.