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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Sovereign Wealth Funds. Picture Vanguard or Blackrock as independent agencies subsidiary to the treasury department. Distinct from traditional, dubiously reliable state trusts that notoriously ruined places like Nauru by being, essentially, market tracking index funds innately resistant to public choice pressures. They're a relatively novel public finance utility very popular among policy wonks with a lot of international experimentation and exploration. Ireland is establishing one now. Singapore and Norway each have SWF systems holding massive proportions of domestic capital and large stocks of foreign capital. There is however an ongoing question, coterminous with the debate over the effect of passive investing generally, as to how much of the economy can be in such funds before you (conceivably) take a productivity hit.