The announcement of a US sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a striking shift in economic policy. SWFs are traditionally associated with resource-rich nations managing national surpluses, not with a country like the US, which issues the global reserve currency. This move raises key questions: What surplus is being captured? What futures are being shaped? Who benefits from this form of accumulation?
From a postcolonial perspective, SWFs have historically functioned as mechanisms of resource management, often imposed on postcolonial states to transform their wealth into financialized capital that can circulate through global markets. Meanwhile, a biopolitical critique examines how such financial instruments are used to govern populations, regulate labor, and enclose public resources within long-term rent-seeking models.
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Postcolonial Resource Governance
In postcolonial states, SWFs were often a response to the colonial extraction of natural resources. After independence, many countries—like Norway with its oil fund or Singapore with its Temasek Holdings*—used SWFs as tools to ensure that *the wealth extracted from their land could be reinvested for national development.
But the US is not an extractive periphery. It is the global financial center, the issuer of the dollar, and the architect of neoliberal privatization. The introduction of a US SWF is not about securing surplus wealth but creating new frontiers of financial enclosure.
“Accumulation by dispossession is about the privatization of public goods, the conversion of common resources into marketable commodities, and the extraction of wealth from once public domains.”
- David Harvey, The New Imperialism
Rather than stewarding excess wealth, the US’ SWF may function as a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession, further consolidating economic power into state-managed financial instruments that primarily benefit elite capital networks.
Biopolitics and the Governance of Life Through Finance
A biopolitical critique shifts the focus from wealth management to the ways financial instruments regulate life itself. SWFs do not just store wealth; they discipline economies and populations by directing investment into certain forms of labor, infrastructure, and social control.
Take the example of infrastructure funds, a key instrument of late liberal governance. These funds transform public needs—energy, housing, transportation—into long-horizon, rent-seeking assets. If the US’ SWF follows this logic, it will not redistribute wealth to the public but instead further privatize and financialize essential services.
“Liberalism must produce society, or rather, liberalism must organize society so that it exists and functions according to the economic model.”
- Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics
A sovereign wealth fund, framed as a nationalist project of “economic security,” may in reality be a mechanism to further subjugate public wealth to financial markets, reinforcing the dominance of private capital rather than countering it.
Reversing the Logic of US-Led Neoliberalism?
What’s especially ironic is that the US spent decades privatizing public wealth, while postcolonial nations built SWFs to resist economic dependency on Western capital markets. Now, facing declining dollar dominance and increased economic instability, the US is pivoting to state-capitalist instruments that it once pressured other nations to avoid.
But the real question is: Who benefits from this?
- Will the SWF reinvest in public infrastructure, creating broad-based economic security?
- Or will it serve as a state-directed investment fund that primarily benefits elite financial networks?
Postcolonial and biopolitical critique remind us that state-backed capital is never neutral. It is always a tool for governing populations—whether through extraction, discipline, or the managed decline of public wealth.
If the US sovereign wealth fund is to serve the public good, it cannot simply be a vehicle for the further concentration of wealth. It must directly challenge the extractive financialization of life itself.
Whose Future is Being Secured?
The question remains: What kind of future is this SWF actually securing?
If history is any guide, such funds are rarely designed to benefit the public at large. Instead, they become instruments of financial governance that reinforce the very inequalities they claim to address.
We should be asking not just what the US SWF will invest in, but who will ultimately control and benefit from its logic of accumulation.
