Steven Mnuchin could soon be signing your money, so it’s kind of a big deal that his signature is illegible.
President-elect Trump has picked Mnuchin to replace Jack Lew as the next Treasury secretary. If the Senate approves his Cabinet pick, then Mnuchin’s signature will appear in the lower right corner of newly printed currency.
But he’s no John Hancock. Mnuchin’s signature is a few disjointed swoops and curves. In this way, he has a lot in common with Lew, whose signature was so bad that President Obama made him change it.
“Jack assures me that he is going to work to make at least one letter legible in order not to debase our currency,” said Obama in 2013.
So what can we learn about Mnuchin from his signature? It might appear meaningless to the untrained eye, but to a graphologist like Kathi McKnight of Colorado, it says a lot.
“The tent-like structure that kickstarts his signature shows both stubbornness and persistency,” she said.
The signature’s “multiple slants” reveal various personality traits, she said.
“The vertical slant in writing reveals a logical, pragmatic thinker, then suddenly you can see how the writing suddenly veers off to the right,” she said. “That shows a far more emotional reactive type of thinking and also shows impulsiveness.”
She also said, “The extreme height of the stroke jetting up to the sky reveals a writer who believes he is right about everything.”
Mnuchin, a former partners at Goldman Sachs and a Hollywood producer, says tax reform will be his top priority if he gets the job as Treasury secretary. He wants to implement the biggest tax overhaul since President Reagan.
But will Mnuchin change his signature? The office of the president-elect didn’t say.
Even Timothy Geithner had to restyle his signature, when he was Treasury secretary.