pull down to refresh
[...]
Gee, what could go wrong?
For starters, the federal government already regulates these companies. It buys from them, taxes them, and investigates them. It can sue them, prosecute them, or even subsidize them. So when the government becomes a major shareholder, neutrality becomes impossible. It’s the corporate equivalent of referees in the NBA Finals or Stanley Cup Final having a financial stake in the teams on the court or ice: They’re no longer just calling the game, they have skin in it.
Sanders points to Norway’s and Alaska’s wealth funds as models, but those comparisons don’t work. Norway and Alaska built their funds from resource revenues generated by oil and minerals the government already owned or controlled—not by imposing a 50 percent stock tax on private companies or installing political directors on corporate boards. Whatever one thinks of those funds, they’re hardly precedents for Washington to confiscate half of private firms because some politicians declare an industry too important to be left alone.
But as Sanders notes, it’s Trump who helped open this door with his February 2025 executive order directing the Treasury and Commerce Departments to develop a plan for a US sovereign wealth fund. It was a bad idea then, and it’s only gotten worse as the administration has instead pursued an ad hoc presidential investment portfolio to avoid Congress creating a formal legal structure with funding rules, transparency, and guardrails.
That administration has now taken or announced equity stakes, warrants, and a golden share in over 20 private companies. No longer content to subsidize, regulate, or contract with private firms, the Trump administration has sought to own, steer, and discipline them.
Trump’s supporters and apologists call this hard-nosed dealmaking, but it’s a grotesquely transactional form of state corporatism. It’s also utterly corrupt.
That’s the Pandora’s box the Trump administration has opened, and Sanders is showing exactly what could come next.
[...]
https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-opened-door-sanderss-sovereign-wealth-fund
reply
Central bank = communism.
All the bailouts the government has done. Think of this in the same category companies being forced to give equity to the government.