Trump floats US sovereign wealth fund as part of economic pitch

Former President Donald Trump in a speech to business leaders on Thursday called for the creation of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, a government-owned investment fund, to finance “great national endeavors.”

While offering few details, Trump said the fund would would yield a “gigantic profit” that could help “pay down the national debt” — an unmet goal from his 2016 campaign.

Sovereign wealth funds are prevalent throughout the industrialized and developing world, with the largest ones residing in oil-rich states like Norway, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations as well as China, Singapore and Hong Kong.

“Why don’t we have a wealth fund? Other countries have wealth funds. We have nothing,” Trump said during his speech to The Economic Club of New York, adding that the U.S. fund would be financed by tariffs “and other intelligent things.”

According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, roughly 100 funds currently manage nearly $13 trillion in assets. That includes a handful of U.S. states including Alaska, Texas, New Mexico and others which have set up their own types of government-run funds initially financed by oil, gas and mineral resources. Trump now wants to do the same at the federal level.

“We will build extraordinary national development projects and everything from highways to airports to transportation infrastructure. … We’ll be able to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing hubs, advanced defense capabilities, cutting-edge medical research and help save billions of dollars in preventing disease in the first place.” Trump said. “And it is many of the people in this room who will be helping to advise and recommend investments for this fund.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how the fund would be structured or what legislation it would take to get through Congress to set something like that up. Critics were already panning the idea as an unworkable sop to wealthy investors shortly after the GOP presidential nominee floated it.

“It’s hard to think of anything more open to corruption than the Donald J Trump sovereign wealth fund — would likely hand over trillions to be managed by cronies charging outrageous fees while steering billions of dollars of investment to himself and his family,” Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Business ‘Economy in crisis’

Trump’s sovereign wealth fund idea emerged as he pitched an economic agenda that doubled down on priorities from his first term, including higher tariffs as well as additional tax cuts, reduced regulation and increased energy production.

The Republican presidential nominee also promised to save trillions of dollars by creating a commission to target fraud and recommend spending cuts. He said the commission would be headed by Tesla founder and X owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who proposed the idea last month and endorsed Trump’s campaign.

The speech also served to draw a contrast with the economic plans of Vice President Kamala Harris just days before the two candidates will square off at a Philadelphia debate.

Seeking to blunt the recent momentum of Harris since her ascension as the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump painted a bleak picture of an “economy in crisis” that has left Americans struggling to make ends meet during the Biden administration.

“Communism is the past, freedom is the future, and it is time to send comrade Kamala Harris back home to California, where crime is rampant and fleeing is the No. 1 occupation,” he said.

“We delivered an economic miracle that Kamala and Joe turned into an economic disaster,” he added later.

Harris laid out her own economic agenda in New Hampshire this week that calls for higher taxes on upper-income households, bigger tax deductions for startup businesses, and greater financial assistance for first-time homebuyers, among other things.

But she also began to deviate from President Joe Biden’s agenda by paring back his proposed increase in the top tax rate on capital gains, proposing to raise it from 23.8 percent to 33 percent instead of Biden’s 44.6 percent.

Harris agrees with Biden on a 28 percent corporate tax rate, up from 21 percent in the 2017 tax law Trump signed. Trump, by contrast, promised to reduce the corporate rate to 15 percent “solely for companies that make their product in America.”

Taking aim at Harris’ proposed tax increases, Trump said it would “lead America into a 1929 Depression” and “turn the United States into Venezuela on steroids.”

Business Praise for McKinley

While business leaders have cheered Trump’s tax cuts, they appeared to stay silent as the former president made a case for higher tariffs as a key to boosting domestic manufacturing. While he offered no numbers, Trump has previously called for tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on all imports — a plan Harris has likened to a “national sales tax.”

Promising to levy “a very substantial tariff” on imports, Trump said, “We are not going to be taken advantage of anymore.”

To make his case, he praised the work of former President William McKinley, who helped push through large tariffs in 1890 while serving as House Ways and Means chairman. While those tariffs faced a public backlash, Trump said President Theodore Roosevelt was able to build roads, dams and national parks “with the money that was made with tariffs from McKinley,” whom Trump called a “highly underrated president.”

Trump also renewed his call for clawing back unspent money provided by the Democratic-backed 2022 clean energy and health care legislation and repealing new tax subsidies for clean energy in that law — presumably including electric-vehicle credits that benefit Musk’s Tesla.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen used a speech in North Carolina on Thursday to defend those credits and urge their retention.

“Rolling them back could raise costs for working families at a moment when it’s imperative that we continue to take action to lower prices,” Yellen said. “And it could give a leg-up to China and other countries that are also investing to compete in these critical industries.”

In outlining other aspects of his economic agenda, Trump called for:

• Cutting at least 10 regulations for every new one he creates.
• Making the U.S. “the world capital for crypto and Bitcoin.”
• Making all 2017 tax cuts permanent, while eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits.
• Ending environmental protections that he said impede the mining of rare earth minerals.
• Eliminating regulations that drive up housing costs while opening up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction.
• Pushing legislation to end all taxpayer-funded benefits to undocumented migrants and banning mortgages for those migrants.

Peter Cohn contributed to this report.