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This Treasury official is running the bailout, and it has been great for his family
By Justin Elliott, Lydia DePillis, and Robert Faturechi
ProPublica, New York
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have become the public faces of the $3 trillion federal coronavirus bailout. Behind the scenes, however, the Treasury's responsibilities have fallen largely to the 42-year-old deputy secretary, Justin Muzinich.
A major beneficiary of that bailout so far: Muzinich & Co., the asset manager founded by his father where Justin served as president before joining the administration. He reported owning a stake worth at least $60 million when he entered government in 2017.
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Today Muzinich retains financial ties to the firm through an opaque transaction in which he transferred his shares in the privately held company to his father. Ethics experts say the arrangement is troubling because his father received the shares for no money up front, and it appears possible that Muzinich can simply get his stake back after leaving government.
When lockdowns crippled the economy in March, the Treasury and the Fed launched an unprecedented effort to buy up corporate debt to avert a freeze in lending at the exact moment businesses needed to borrow to keep running. That effort has succeeded, at least temporarily, with credit continuing to flow to companies over the last several weeks. This policy also allowed those who were heavily invested in corporate loans to recoup huge losses.
Muzinich & Co. has long specialized in precisely this market, managing approximately $38 billion of clients' money, including in riskier instruments known as junk, or high-yield, bonds. Since the Fed and the Treasury's actions in late March, the bond market has roared back. Muzinich & Co. has reversed billions in losses, according to a review of its holdings, with 28 of the 29 funds tracked by the investor research service Morningstar Direct rising in that period. The firm doesn't publicly detail all of its holdings, so a precise figure can't be calculated. ...
... For the remainder of the report:
https://www.propublica.org/article/this-treasury-official-is-running-the...
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