Steve Mnuchin Dissed 181 Major CEOs in a New Battle Over the Future of Profits
Monday, September 23, 2019
By Eric Rosenbaum
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has his fair share of critics on the left and among the larger public, but last week he added close to 200 CEOs to a list of those who might have reason to hold something against him, and all it took was five words.
“I wouldn’t have signed it.”
With those five words, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed the 181 CEOs of major corporations — including the CEOs of Amazon, American Express, Apple, Coca-Cola, J.P. Morgan, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, even the CEO of his old Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, and on and on, across all of the major industries in the U.S., from airlines to consumer goods, financial services, natural resources and utilities — who recently signed onto the Business Roundtable statement on the purpose of a corporation, committing to value customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support communities.
All of those goals seem worthy, but as far as Mnuchin is concerned, signing onto these goals as part of the purpose of a corporation is all wrong.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
