Days after President Donald Trump announced thestruggling chipmaker Intel has agreed to give the US a 10% stake, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett said the deal might be the first of others like it.
“The president has made it clear all the way back to the campaign that he thinks, in the end, it would be great if the US could start to build up a sovereign wealth fund,” Hassett told CNBC. “I’m sure that, at some point, there will be more transactions, if not in this industry, in other industries.”
The Intel deal specifically came about because the company received money from the Biden-era CHIPS Act, and Trump wanted to position the federal government to stand to benefit from that funding, he said. Hassett said that when the federal government has given money to major companies in the past, “the taxpayers have received nothing in return.”
He claimed that Uncle Sam’s partial ownership of Intel does not give the government any say in how the company runs itself and that there’s also precedent in the US government owning companies, Hassett said, pointing to mortgage financers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as examples. (According to the company’s SEC 8-K filing, the government is purchasing common stock and will be required to vote its shares as directed by Intel’s board of directors.)
CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin pressed Hassett on whether the government will use its influence to pressure other companies to buy Intel’s chips. Hassett replied, “I don’t expect that’s what’s going to happen,” claiming that Intel will instead use federal money paired with an infusion of private investment to “get its act together.”
New government investment portfolio? Trump is serious about the US establishing its own sovereign wealth fund. The president issued an executive order in February for the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce to draft a plan for creating one.
Hassett said that “many, many” other countries have sovereign wealth funds. Examples include Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the China Investment Corporation, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
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