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Bloomberg Businessweek August 2026 |
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Год выпуска: August 2026 Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek Жанр: Экономика/Финансы Издательство: Bloomberg L.P. Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке) Качество: OCR Количество страниц: 96 Let a US Sovereign Wealth Fund BloomOver the past few years, Western countries that were once reluctant to own or invest in their nation’s companies have embraced a tool more commonly associated with petroleum-rich and export-driven economies: the sovereign wealth fund. Canada, Ireland, Portugal and Spain all recently unveiled investment vehicles intended to help build up their domestic manufacturing, boost their progress in fields such as artificial intelligence and clean energy, and hopefully squirrel away any winnings for their own citizens. Remarkably, such funds are broadly politically popular even in polarized times. “The tool is everywhere, and it connects the left and the right,” says Ashby Monk, executive director of the Stanford Research Initiative on Long-Term Investing. “The state is moving from being a regulator, borrower and spender to an owner, investor and capital allocator.” The US is the latest country to flirt with the idea of a sovereign wealth fund, but somewhat characteristically, it’s yet to settle on a concrete plan. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February 2025 calling for the establishment of such a fund “to maximize the stewardship of our national wealth for the sole benefit of American citizens.” The order left out a few key details, such as who’d manage the fund and, crucially, where the money would come from. Since then there’s been a series of investments in chipmakers, rare-earth miners and quantum computing companies, though the structures of these transactions lack much consistency. Attempts to shape these ad hoc deals into a cohesive strategy for a sovereign wealth fund have been accompanied by improbable ideas for how to capitalize it—with proceeds from the sale of the US portion of TikTok by its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or with revenue from Trump’s tariffs. (Neither of these options panned out.) The latest and most intriguing proposal, floated not only by the administration but also by one of its most outspoken critics, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is for the government to anchor a fund with ownership stakes in high-flying AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. There’s a good case to be made that all Americans and not just the tech elite should benefit from the AI boom. Even the AI companies seem amenable to the idea. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman suggested giving the US government a 5% stake in his company, according to the Financial Times, arguing it would allow US citizens to share in the upside—and presumably also provide a hedge against the possible labor market downsides—of the coming AI disruption. There are a few reasons sovereign wealth funds are suddenly a hot topic. Saudi Arabia’s $900 billion-plus Public Investment Fund and Singapore’s $500 billion Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd. have generated solid returns since their inception and helped attract development and (arguably) diversify their country’s economy. They can also be a fair way to compensate taxpayers when governments are forced to prop up important companies in a crisis, like the too-big-to-fail US banks during the 2008 financial crisis, or bulk up a vital supply chain, such as the personal protective equipment industry during Covid-19. Just imagine if the American public now owned part of N95 respirator maker 3M, along with Ford, Citigroup or JPMorgan Chase. Sanders, writing in the New York Times, argues that powerful AI models were built on our collective intelligence, so citizens should get to partake in their bounty. His proposal calls for a US sovereign wealth fund to take 50% stakes in the AI giants and then pay out a 5% annual dividend directly to citizens. There are several reasons the US may want to proceed cautiously. For starters, state ownership on such a scale would mark a notable departure from traditional noninterventionist US economic policy and perhaps deter other investors from buying into these companies. Then there’s the issue that if the government invests in tech firms, lawmakers will be naturally more reluctant to hamper their growth with onerous regulation, even when that’s in society’s best interests. Indeed, that may be one reason for Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and their peers to so eagerly volunteer their stock. A fund also needs seasoned, professional management, free from meddling by government officials and strict independence from whatever stiff political winds are blowing at the time. Consider the fate of the state pension funds of California, Texas and elsewhere, for example, which had to scamper toward and then away from ESG (environmental, social and governance) as socially conscious investing went in and out of fashion. “It’s a good idea, but I don’t know if it would be a good idea for this country, because we are so polarized,” says Michael Maduell, founder of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, a research company. That polarization is on full display in America’s conversation about this topic. Politicians from both parties seem to agree it’s a good idea but have different notions on how to fund it, manage it and determine who should benefit from the proceeds. Strategic clarity at the outset is an urgent necessity in such an endeavor. So the question may not be whether the US should have a sovereign wealth fund, but whether the country has its act together enough to deserve one. Remarks
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