With every move he makes, it’s clearer than ever: Trump is going to crash the global economy

Believing that the rest of the planet is blind to his clumsy machinations, US president Donald Trump has signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund over the next 12 months, and suggested that it could be used to acquire TikTok.

This is nonsense. According to the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSW) there are more than 90 such funds, which manage a combined $8 trillion in assets, among which those of Norway, China, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are the largest. Used mainly to finance large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at stimulating economic growth and job creation, they are all funded by the country’s budget surplus, typically from the sale of volatile resources like oil or minerals. In the case of the United States, which for decades has had the world’d largest budget deficit, the question is where would the money for its sovereign wealth fund come from?

Trump’s solution is to claim it will be funded by “tariffs and other smart things”. The problem here is that the dollar is still the world’s reserve currency and the United States has shown itself all too prepared to print money whenever it feels its economy needs a stimulus, generating inflation that the rest of the world ends up paying for.