Bloomberg, Warren jockey to be named Treasury Secretary

The presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has already fielded phone calls from both former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Each politician made themselves available to serve as Treasury Secretary in the administration, though Warren is seen as the more likely contender.

Bloomberg, a billionaire Manhattanite, spent more than $100 million to help Biden win the State of Florida, and spent more than $500 million earlier this year to run for President in the Democratic Primary himself. The behavior has attracted the criticism of political professionals who are in awe of the inefficiency with which he spent that money. With that kind of spending inefficiency, a Bloomberg nomination for Treasury Secretary would be ridiculed from the start.

It might also raise questions about the propriety of that spending.

Warren, on the other hand, would be welcomed more warmly among the progressive wing of the party and has already called for a slew of reform legislation: from establishing a cabinet department focused on economic development, to expanding consumer protection laws, to reforming the way infrastructure is financed, to giving the marijuana industry access to the banking system, to enabling student loan borrowers to declare bankruptcy on those debts.

Warren has even agreed to ‘quarterback’ an Indian Bank Regulatory Act, which would recognize and affirm Tribal governments’ sovereign scope of commercial and civil regulatory jurisdiction, allowing indigenous communities to build their own financial markets, to accumulate and manage sovereign wealth, to protect Indian commerce from federal expropriation, and to engage in nation-to-nation trade.