New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday that Robert Steel, Trinity ’73 and former chair of the Board of Trustees, will be the next deputy mayor for economic development.
Steel, 58, who lives in Greenwich, Conn., has formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Wachovia Corp., vice chair of Goldman Sachs, & Co. and undersecretary of the treasury for domestic finance.
As deputy mayor, Steel will be responsible for leading the city’s major economic projects and will report directly to Bloomberg.
Steel will replace Robert Lieber, 55, who announced in May that he accepted a senior executive position at the Island Capital Group. Lieber was also a former banker before joining Bloomberg’s cabinet, having served as managing director for the private equity division of Lehman Brothers.
Steel, a Durham native, has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 1993, having served as its chair from 2005 to 2009. He was previously chair of the Duke Management Company and a member of the Duke University Health System board of directors.
More recently, he led the presidential search committee that unanimously brought President Richard Brodhead to Duke.
Steel worked for nearly three decades at Goldman Sachs, retiring in 2004 as vice chair. He is now senior director for the firm.
In July 2008, Steel was named CEO and president of Wachovia, and moved to Charlotte, N.C.. Unable to recover Wachovia’s fiscal losses, he sold the company to Wells Fargo & Co. in late 2008. As part of the deal, Steel joined the Wells Fargo board. Charlotte is now East Coast operations center for Wells Fargo.
Steel’s selection is the latest in a series of Bloomberg’s appointments outside the government realm. Steel is also the third person to fill this important position under Bloomberg’s administration. Lieber’s predecessor, Dan Doctoroff, currently runs Bloomberg, L.P, the mayor’s private company.
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