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The All-In Podcast
🚨Should the US create a Sovereign Wealth Fund? Chamath and Friedberg discuss

Chamath:

“I think that we should start a sovereign wealth fund right now.”

“The great news is that these Trump tariff deals come with huge amounts of capital that these other countries have committed to spending inside the United States.”

“We've exceeded $1T of inbound capital on the investment side. We get 90% of the upside.”

“A lot of that capital should be the seed capital for a sovereign wealth fund.”

Friedberg:

“The concern I have is anytime we create a new income stream at the federal government, or we have some sort of growing asset that you mark up on the book, someone tends to invest ahead of the curve on that.”

“Meaning someone takes that and they're like, ‘Oh, great, I can spend more now.’ I mean, we even saw this in California (with) Gavin Newsom and the budget skyrocketed as the income went up.”

“Rather than take the surplus and book it for a rainy day, they went and spent ahead of it, and then all of a sudden they had a huge deficit.”

“Which is what happened with Social Security is, it's like, okay, all these people are providing this income every year to the federal government, which they're supposed to be paying into their Social Security Trust Fund, which is gonna go bankrupt sometime between 2030 and 2033.”

“But then what happened is we raided the coffers, we took all that money, and we started spending it on random new programs.”

“And the problem is, by giving the government more assets, by giving the government more income, we set ourselves up for a circumstance where the federal government, the Congress says, ‘Great, we got more money to spend. Let's do X, Y, and Z program and let's do this. Let's build a high speed train. Let's do this. These are all good for American people.’”

“And all of a sudden, you don't actually solve any real problems. And this is why my argument is that we should use it to fill the hole that we have, for example, in Social Security.”

“And that needs to become an asset that's strictly used as an offset on Social Security, because if you don't put it in that box, it just becomes another spending mechanism.”
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