Bringing It Home: How an American Sovereign Fund Undoes the Great Extraction
For thirty years, globalization moved the gains to multinational margins and the costs to American workers and towns. The sovereign fund now taking shape is the instrument that brings the value back — and pays it out as a citizen’s dividend.
The Hamiltonian Turn — Article III, the final paper of a Vector1 Research Program
By Brian Curry · Vector1 Research
This closes The Hamiltonian Turn*. Article I diagnosed America’s return to its founding program; Article II showed the tariff’s resented price effect is a one-time step back to honest prices, against gains that compound. This paper is about the instrument that turns those compounding gains into something every American can hold: a sovereign wealth fund. For three decades, globalization generated an enormous surplus — and routed it to corporate margins while hollowing the communities and the industrial base that the offshoring left behind. The fund now taking shape is how the public recaptures its share of the economy being rebuilt, and pays it back out as a dividend. We show what was extracted, how the fund brings it home without a new tax on working families, and the century of compounding returns it opens.*
1. Where the Gains Went
For a generation, Americans were told that globalization was a win for everyone: cheaper goods for consumers, bigger markets for firms, efficiency all around. The first half was true and we accounted for it honestly in Article II — goods did get cheaper, on a discount underwritten by foreign labor conditions and lost domestic capacity. The half that went unspoken is where the surplus went. Trade did generate enormous gains. They simply did not flow to the workers whose jobs moved, or to the towns whose factories closed, or to the public balance sheet. They flowed, overwhelmingly, to corporate margins.
Figure 1. Corporate profits and the labor share of national income, 1995–2024. The offshoring era tripled the first and eroded the second. The widening gap is the surplus globalization produced — real value, captured by capital, while the communities and the industrial base that bore the adjustment got the bill. The sovereign fund exists to close that gap from the other side.
This is not an argument against trade, and it is not a search for villains in the ordinary sense — multinationals arbitraging cost differentials were doing exactly what the incentives told them to do. It is an argument about who holds the resulting claim. When a nation’s productive base is offshored, the efficiency gain is banked privately while the cost — displaced workers, depleted towns, lost strategic capacity, a public that must fund the safety net for all of it — is socialized. The gain is private; the loss is public. A sovereign fund is the mechanism that puts a public claim on the public side of that ledger — that lets the citizens who absorbed the costs of globalization own a share of the prosperity of what comes next.
2. The Great Extraction, Named
State the imbalance as an identity. The surplus of the offshoring decades decomposed into three streams that did not move together:
Corporate margins rose on the arbitrage between American prices and foreign costs. The labor share fell as the jobs that supported middle-class communities moved offshore. And public industrial capacity — the shipyards, the tool-and-die shops, the chip fabs, the supplier ecosystems — atrophied, taking with it both the tax base and the strategic resilience the country is now spending hundreds of billions to rebuild. Three streams, one direction: value concentrating upward and outward, costs settling downward and at home.
The Hamiltonian turn of Articles I and II already addresses the flow going forward — reshoring rebuilds the capacity, the subsidies restart the learning curves, the rebalanced trade restores the wage base. But reversing the flow is only half the repair. The other half is the stock: a generation of accumulated gains sitting in corporate valuations, built in part on a globalization settlement that socialized its costs. The fund is how the public takes an ownership share in that stock — not by confiscation, but by capitalizing the instruments the turn already created and letting them compound on the public’s behalf.
3. The Fund as the Public’s Stake — Seeded by What Was Extracted
A sovereign wealth fund is, at its core, a simple idea: the public holds equity, and the returns on that equity — dividends plus appreciation — accrue to citizens rather than to a narrow ownership class:
The objection always raised — we cannot afford to capitalize a fund while running deficits — turns out to be obsolete, because the seed capital comes from recovering value that was being lost, not from taxing families that are already paying. Three streams already exist or are owed:
Figure 2. Three sources, none a new burden on working Americans. Tariff revenue — $195 billion in FY2025 — is the proceeds of rebalanced trade. The existing strategic-equity portfolio ($21B in stakes from the CHIPS and critical-minerals programs) is transferred in at value. And the data back-debt our companion series priced is a claim the largest technology firms already owe the public for the data their models were built on. Each stream is a recovery of value that was leaving; together they seed a fund that compounds.
This is where Vector1’s two research programs converge into a single institution. Returns to Data argued that the public is owed an equity stake for the data that built the AI economy; The Hamiltonian Turn argues the public is owed an equity stake in the industrial economy being rebuilt. They are the same stake, and the American Fund is the same vehicle — the place where both the data the public created and the industries the public’s policy is reshoring pay dividends back to the people who made them possible. The Alaska Permanent Fund proved the principle for oil; Norway proved it at scale, compounding a resource windfall into a $2.2 trillion endowment that returned 15.1% in 2025. There is no economic reason the same machine cannot hold America’s strategic and data equity for the same beneficiaries: everyone.
4. The Bill, Returned
Article II was honest about the cost of the turn: the price step is real, roughly $1,500 per household per year at current scope, and it lands hardest on those least able to absorb it. The fund is the answer to that cost — not an offsetting abstraction, but a literal return of value to the same households, as a dividend that grows with the economy being rebuilt:
Figure 3. The household ledger over time. The price step (Article II) is paid once and stays flat. The citizen’s dividend compounds with the fund’s net asset value as the reshored economy grows — modest at first, then overtaking the one-time bill outright. This is the structure that makes the adjustment fair: the families who pay the step are the shareholders who collect the recovery.
The political design follows directly. The deepest objection to the turn — that it asks ordinary households to pay higher prices so that capability accrues somewhere abstract — dissolves once the recovery is visibly theirs. Route the dividend to the households paying the step, and the one-time bill becomes the entry cost of a permanent ownership stake, the way Alaskans experience the oil under their state not as a tax but as a yearly check. The fund converts a cost the public resents into an asset the public owns.
5. The Hamiltonian Century
Put the recapture into the growth picture. America’s output in 2050 can be decomposed into a baseline plus the returns the turn is built to capture — and the fund adds a term the earlier articles did not: the recovery of the wage and dividend base that globalization eroded:
Learning curves compounding on the reshored manufacturing base, cluster spillovers as fab and supplier ecosystems thicken, the resilience premium as critical supply chains de-risk, and — the new term — the wage-and-dividend recovery as the gains flow back to households through paychecks and the fund. Together they bend the trajectory:
Figure 4. Three channels through which the extracted surplus comes home: reshored wages and jobs, citizen fund dividends, and restored public capacity. Stacked, they carry the recapture ratio — the share of the lost surplus returned to the public — from near zero toward the 0.5–0.6 range within a decade. This is what “bringing it home” looks like as a measurable quantity rather than a slogan.
The deep claim of the century is the one Hamilton made in 1791 and the data has spent four years confirming: advantage is built, not endowed; whoever produces, learns; and a nation that rebuilds its productive base owns the compounding return on it for generations. The fund’s contribution is to make sure that return is owned broadly — that the second American industrial era does not repeat the distributional pattern of the globalization era it is correcting. Build the capacity, and the economy grows. Hold it in a citizens’ fund, and the growth belongs to the citizens.
6. The Measure of Success
The whole program reduces to a single ratio — the share of the extracted surplus that the public gets back:
For thirty years that ratio ran toward zero: the gains went up and out, the costs came down and home. The mandate of the American Fund — and the test by which this entire turn should be judged a generation from now — is to move it toward one. Not all the way; a dynamic economy needs private return to function, and this is not an argument against profit or against trade. It is an argument that the public, having borne the costs of the last settlement, holds a legitimate claim on the prosperity of the next one — and that a sovereign fund is the cleanest instrument ever devised for honoring that claim.
7. The Close
Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, a Treasury Secretary argued that a nation becomes wealthy and sovereign by building the capacity to make what it will need — and that the returns on that capacity should strengthen the whole country, not merely those positioned to capture them. For a century and a half, America followed that logic and became the workshop of the world. Then, for fifty years, it exported its industrial base and let the gains concentrate, calling the discount prosperity while the towns that made things went quiet.
The turn of 2018–2026 is the wager that the oldest American playbook still works. This series has traced it: the subsidies rebuild capability, the equity model secures the strategic core, the tariff is a one-time step back to honest prices whose gains compound — and the sovereign fund is the instrument that gathers all of it and pays it back to the public. The data series priced what the technology economy owes the people who built it; this series priced what the industrial economy owes the people who absorbed the cost of losing it. The same fund can hold both claims, compound them for decades, and distribute them as the birthright of every citizen in the economy being rebuilt.
The arithmetic is done. The instruments exist. The seed capital is already flowing. What remains is the decision to gather it into a fund that belongs to everyone — to ensure that this time, when the surplus is created, it comes home. That is how a turn becomes a century.
— End of The Hamiltonian Turn series.
References and Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: corporate profits and labor-share-of-income series (1995–2024) — the divergence of Figure 1.
- Norges Bank Investment Management (2026): Government Pension Fund Global ~$2.2T; 15.1% return in 2025 — the scale precedent for §3.
- Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation: 40+ years of resident dividends — the citizen-dividend precedent for §4.
- The Hill (May 2026): U.S. customs duties $195B in FY2025; the U.S. as the only major developed economy without a federal sovereign fund; existing seeding streams.
- CFR Investment Tracker (April 2026): the ~$21B strategic-equity portfolio (16 deals), CHIPS and critical-minerals stakes — the equity seed of §3.
- Executive Order 14196 (Feb 3, 2025): directive establishing a U.S. sovereign wealth fund.
- Autor, D., Dorn, D., & Hanson, G. — the “China shock” literature documenting the concentrated local costs of offshoring that §1–§2 describe.
- Wright, T. P. (1936); Juhász, Lane & Rodrik (2023) — the learning-curve and spillover terms of the 2050 decomposition (Equation 5).
- Vector1 Research (2026). Returns to Data, Article IV — the data back-debt as an equity claim the public holds against the largest technology firms (the third seed stream).
- Vector1 Research (2026). The Hamiltonian Turn I–II — the framework and Hamilton Index (I); the one-time-step theorem and the $1,500 household price step (II).
Methodological note: Figure 1 presents stylized BEA-based levels; the qualitative divergence of profits and labor share over the period is well documented. The seeding figure (Fig. 2) treats existing and owed streams as illustrative capitalization, not a budget proposal. The dividend and recapture-ratio scenarios (Figs. 3–4) are conditional on stated fund-return and phase-in assumptions and are arguments with published parameters, not forecasts; the dividend crossover year moves with the assumed NAV growth rate. The recapture ratio Ω is a framework measure, not an official statistic. Dollar figures nominal. Code and parameters: github.com/vector1-ai (forthcoming).
Brian Curry is a Kansas City–based data scientist, AI researcher, and founder of Vector1 Research. The Hamiltonian Turn program — Articles I–III — develops the economic theory and measurement of America’s return to developmental statecraft. Its companion program, Returns to Data*, covers the economics of data ownership in the age of AI. Both are collected at vector1.ai.*
Contact: brian at vector1.ai · License: CC BY 4.0
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