Hell no!
The WSJ had an excellent Editorial a few weeks back on Trump's supposed Sovereign Wealth Fund (#877076). It was succinct, simple, and directly addressed the problem: politicians should not steward wealth. They are not entrepreneurs; they should not/could not steward resources well.
Leverage federal assets to create a new investment fund for the political class to invest in whatever it pleases, including private companies. What could possibly go wrong? More likely, it would take resources from the private economy, fund political boondoggles, and mess with the business decisions of private companies.
They made my point (#877076), too, about exchange stabilization and/or investing surplus -- neither of which makes any sense for the U.S.:
Why has no President done this before? One reason is the U.S. perennially runs budget deficits, projected at $1.9 trillion for this fiscal year. Countries with sovereign wealth funds typically invest surplus revenue from commodity sales or excess foreign exchange reserves from trade surpluses, e.g., China.
Also, the assets (minus perhaps the gold mark-to-market play) are mostly imaginary:
In practice, federal assets aren’t what they seem. Washington’s biggest asset is its $1.6 trillion in student debt, about a quarter of which is already set to be written off. Other phantom assets include hundreds of billions of dollars in loans for disaster relief, low-income housing and green energy. The U.S. also owns some $2.6 trillion in property, software, plants and equipment, which are subject to depreciation.
But with ownership comes political control. A sovereign wealth fund would give Mr. Trump and future Presidents more leverage to bully businesses. Witness how public pension funds use their investments to coerce companies to adopt their climate and cultural agenda. The French government’s stake in Renault has made it harder to cut jobs and close factories so the auto marker could become more competitive. If the feds own 10% of Pfizer, do you think Mr. Lutnick wouldn’t soon be telling the company what it can charge on drugs?
Once more, I'm mostly just quoting directly from the piece since it is so spot-effing-on!
Mr. Trump confuses “sovereign wealth” with the real wealth of nations. National wealth is created by the ingenuity and risk-taking of its citizens. They build new companies and make new discoveries. That’s how America became rich and built an economy worth trillions.
And the finale:
Government doesn’t create wealth, and a sovereign wealth fund would merely be one more way for the government to commandeer private wealth for political purposes.
non-paywalled here: https://archive.md/aDcki