Trump adds more Treasury secretary candidates, media reports

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President-elect Donald Trump added former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh and billionaire Marc Rowan to the list of candidates to become his Treasury secretary, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

A former investment banker, Warsh, 54, served on the Federal Reserve Board from 2006 to 2011. He was seen as both a fiscal hawk and a proponent of higher savings rates.

Rowan, 62, co-founded investment manager Apollo Global Management and became the firm’s CEO in 2021.

Republican U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, 65, who Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last week, is also in the running for the role, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Trump has not announced his nominee for the role, but Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, and investor Scott Bessent have been considered as top candidates for the job.

The Republican president-elect has begun to have second thoughts about Lutnick and Bessent, the New York Times said, and was expected to invite candidates to meet with him in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago club this week.

Lutnick co-chaired Trump’s transition effort. A New Yorker like Trump, he has uniformly praised the president-elect’s economic policies, including his backing of tariffs.

Bessent, a key economic adviser to Trump, is a longtime hedge fund investor who taught at Yale University for several years and has a warm relationship with the president-elect.

Billionaire Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out in favor of Lutnick on Saturday, making public the internal jockeying on the decision.

The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Katharine Jackson; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Lincoln Feast.)