President Trump Signed an executive order on Monday directing the Treasury and Commerce Departments to begin the process of creating a sovereign wealth fund — an investment fund owned by the government.
“I think it’s about time that this country had a sovereign wealth fund,” Trump said. He reportedly also suggested that the fund could buy TikTok, the social media app owned by China-based ByteDance that was banned in the United States before Trump gave it a 75-day extension.
“TikTok, we’re going to be doing something, perhaps with TikTok, and perhaps not, if we make the right deal, we’ll do it,” Trump said. “But I have the right to do that, and we might put that in the sovereign wealth fund.”
It’s unclear how the sovereign wealth fund might work or where it would get its funding. “Typically such funds rely on a country's budget surplus to make investments, but the U.S. operates at a deficit,” Reuters notes. “Its creation also would likely require approval from Congress.”
Trump has previously suggested that such a fund could be financed by “tariffs and other intelligent things.”
“We’re gonna stand this thing up in the next 12 months. We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters in the Oval Office. "There'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.”
The Biden administration had reportedly also considered creating a sovereign wealth fund.
Reuters reports that, according to the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds, there are more than 90 such funds globally that manage more than $8 trillion in assets.