President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday directing his Treasury and Commerce secretaries to begin the process of establishing an American sovereign wealth fund.
Trump signed the order in the Oval Office flanked by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, Trump’s nominee for Commerce secretary.
“We’re gonna have a sovereign wealth fund, which we’ve never had,” Trump said. “We have a lot of things that create wealth, and you’ve seen that over the last two weeks.”
Bessent said the fund would be established within a year.
“This is very exciting. We’re going to stand this thing
up within the next 12 months. We are going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people,” Bessent said, adding the administration is “going to put the assets to work.”
“We’re going to study best practices as done around the world. It’ll be a combination of liquid assets–assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people,” he added.
Lutnick emphasized that the business the U.S. government “does with companies should create value for American citizens.”
“If we are going to buy 2 billion COVID vaccines, maybe we should have some warrants and some equity in these companies and have that grow for the help of the American people,” he said.
Trump pointed to TikTok as an example of a potential asset the United States could place in the sovereign wealth fund.
We’re going to be doing something, perhaps with TikTok and perhaps not. If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t. But I have the right to do that, and we might put that in the sovereign wealth fund, whatever we make, or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people. A lot of options. But we could put that as an example in the fund. And we have a lot of other things that we could put in the fund.
Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak suggested in his book The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, which War Room Books published in August, that Trump create a sovereign wealth fund.
“President Trump will propose a ‘rainy day’ fund within the Treasury, into which the U.S. will deposit a mix of dollars, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies,” Pollak noted.
“The ‘rainy day’ fund can act as a sovereign wealth investment fund whose assets, including such cryptocurrencies as Congress may issue to service the debt, can offset the nation’s liabilities,” he added. “Such a fund should have a politically independent board.”
