How the U.S. Can Build a Profitable Sovereign Wealth Fund

On February 3, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) for the United States, commenting that this will become one of the largest SWF in the world.

For context, SWFs are state-owned investment funds or state-regulated private funds made up of money generated using surplus revenues. The surplus revenue can originate from trade or natural resource development, as in the case of Norway ($1.8 trillion U.S. dollars) and Abu Dhabi (1 trillion U.S. dollars), which rely on excess oil reserves. Chile uses individual contributions to fund a private retirement pension system (227 billion U.S. dollars).