America’s Financial System Is Broken—But We Don’t Need the Fed to Fix It
Why Private Markets Won’t Fund the Factories, Grids, and Supply Chains America Needs and How We Fix It.
Trump, Powell and the Federal Reserve
What if I told you both Trump and Powell are right?
We all feel the cracks.
Factories closing. Bankruptcies piling up. Government stepping in on deals like MP Materials and Intel just to keep America’s supply chains alive.
Why aren’t private capital markets working anymore?
Is it because interest rates need to be lowered? Tariffs? Or are the banks simply broken?
The truth is, those cracks are only symptoms. The deeper problem is structural.
America’s financial ecosystem is broken.
And yet—America still has the most powerful capital markets in the world.
So how is it possible that we can’t fund the factories, grids, and supply chains that secure our future as a global power?
The answer?
Our capital plumbing system is clogged.
We have trillions of dollars. But they’re trapped in the wrong structures. The money isn’t flowing where America needs it most.
Trump, Powell, and the Same Fight
President Trump pushes for lower interest rates. Not just for politics—he wants to make borrowing cheaper and fuel economic growth.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell resists. Not because he’s playing politics—because if rates fall without precision, cheap money floods into speculation instead of productive industry. That leads to bubbles and inflation, not real economic growth.
Different approaches. Same mission: fighting for the future of the American people.
The good news? We don’t need to wait for the banks or the Fed to fix this. We can build new pipes that channel America’s savings into industry—not bubbles.
Hamilton’s Genius: A Closed Loop
We’ve been here before—almost 240 years ago.
In 1790, the United States was drowning in Revolutionary War debt. No credit. No investor confidence. No way to fund an industrial base.
Enter Alexander Hamilton.
He designed a closed-loop system:
Tariffs on imports and domestic excise taxes (on goods like whiskey) created steady revenue and encouraged domestic manufacturing.
The National Bank—20% government-funded, 80% private investors—became the nation’s credit engine, lending directly into industry and spurring commerce and manufacturing.
That growth generated more tariff and tax revenue, which cycled back to the government to pay interest on the national debt.
A Sinking Fund, fed by surplus revenues, bought back bonds, retiring principal and providing market stability.
Hamilton’s loop turned revenue → credit → industry → revenue—the flywheel that powered America’s first Industrial Revolution.
It wasn’t subsidy. It was structure. A loop aligning government, capital, and industry.
Hamilton didn’t cut interest rates. He made them fall naturally by engineering investor confidence: steady revenues, a disciplined Sinking Fund, and a national credit engine that made U.S. bonds safe while channeling proceeds into productive industry—turning public credit into national growth.
That trust and that loop seeded America’s first Industrial Revolution.
Fast Forward: 2025
We don’t have a Hamiltonian bank. We have the Federal Reserve—a bank for banks, not builders.
And banks? They’ve retreated from lending at scale to new businesses, hoarding deposits instead. Post-’08 regulation raised capital requirements so high that even mature cash-flowing machine shops struggle to get reasonable loans.
Machine shops sit in the foundational layer of America’s supply chains—alongside materials, feedstock (such as chemicals), processing, fabrication, precision manufacturing, tool & die and others. Facilities in this layer transform raw inputs into precision parts across materials like metals, plastics, composites, and chemicals. They cast, forge, cut, weld, and assemble components for power-grid transformers, semiconductor-fab tooling, 5G housings, surgical instruments, and airframe parts for fighter jets and spacecraft.
Most are tier-2 or tier-3 suppliers feeding giants like GE, Siemens, Lockheed, Intel, and NVIDIA and if they can’t deliver, those OEMs can’t assemble the final product. Many of these shops rely on CNC machines, lathes, mills, grinders—but they also rely on skilled humans who can hear, feel, and adjust cuts in real time. This craftsmanship is far from fully automated, which makes expanding capacity even more urgent.
When they can’t get financing to buy new machines or train workers, entire programs—power plants, satellites, semiconductor fabs—get delayed. SBA loans help, but founders tell me covenants often block them from reinvesting profits into new equipment, the very thing they need to grow.
But it’s not just machine shops. We need capital upstream to open mines, expand refineries, and build processing facilities that supply raw materials. And downstream, capital-intensive startups are starving too—not just shipyards and power plants, but pioneers of new materials, advanced manufacturing, robotics lines, fusion reactors, bio-manufacturing, and next-generation mining, transportation, energy, and agriculture technologies.
Exactly the projects America needs most—and yet they are the ones least able to get financed.
Can you imagine if the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Fords of the 19th century had been unable to raise the money to build their steel mills, refineries, and factories? There would have been no Industrial Revolution—and today, we face the same choice, except we’re toe-to-toe with other global powers in AI and racing to meet unprecedented energy demand.
Private markets aren’t stepping in at the scale this moment demands. Venture capital, private credit, and private equity are optimized for software multiples, quick paybacks, or later-stage companies—not welding torches, large data centers, or mass-housing factories.
And the truth is, these capital-intensive companies were never meant to rely on venture capital beyond R&D. They’re building hard assets—assets that should be financeable and borrowed against. Yet the system doesn’t make that possible at scale.
So money sits idle. Foundries, forges, and shops can’t expand. Startups can’t break ground, shorten lead times, or cross the Valley of Death.
I saw this firsthand growing up in metal shops: razor-thin margins, tight cash flow, no slack but they can’t take on larger contracts without capital.
Picture this:
A shop wins a $2 million turbine component order. It needs $500 thousand for raw materials and $300 thousand for payroll—but won’t get paid for 24–36 months, plus 90 days after delivery. That’s nearly $800 thousand out the door for years. And for some complex parts, the wait can stretch to 72 months. Without working capital and equipment financing, shops are forced to turn down growth.
Now zoom out:
That single component becomes part of a gas-turbine engine powering a natural-gas plant—and ultimately an AI data center. One developer told me utilities now demand customers guarantee up to 90% of their power request for 15–20 years—often tying up $1 billion+ in deposits or letters of credit before a single shovel hits the ground.
Two months ago, I attended Reindustrialize, a summit of about 1,000 leaders from venture capital, founders, think tanks, academia, big tech, and government. In the room were the Secretary of the SBA, the Secretary of the Navy, and senior CIA officials—all focused on one thing: rebuilding America’s industrial base.
Yes regulation and procurement processes slow us down but the number-one issue echoed?
The worker shortage.
Millions of metal mill operators, forgers, casters, machinists, welders, fabricators, assemblers, and construction workers are nearing retirement, with too few apprentices coming in behind them. Without guaranteed demand and financing to expand equipment and hire, shops can’t train the next generation fast enough, risking a hollowed-out workforce just as demand surges.
We talk about years-long lead times for gas turbines as a problem but finance those 24–36 month component buildouts and the upstream metal-processing stages, and you fast-track entire energy supply chains. And that’s just one sector.
From what I’ve seen, everything begins with capital—and today, that capital isn’t reaching the choke points that keep the entire system moving.
This problem is often invisible—even to the best investors and leaders—because it sits in mills, foundries, forges, on factory floors, and early stage industrial startups that don’t always have a voice in national conversations.
The administration knows we need capital and new forms of revenue—tariffs, tax incentives, and industrial policy all point toward re-creating a Hamiltonian closed-loop system. But without a modern credit engine to circulate capital into production, the loop will never close.
This isn’t just a policy gap.
It’s a system failure.
So let’s redesign the system.
The Proposal: New Pipes for a New Loop
We need a credit engine that does what Hamilton’s bank once did but at 21st-century scale. One that works alongside today’s capital markets to channel money straight into the heart of the industrial base: expanding capacity, shortening lead times, fueling innovation, and cycling returns back into the system to pay down debt—driving interest rates lower as confidence grows.
A modern closed loop like this could turn trillions of idle savings into energy innovation, infrastructure, and advanced supply chains—unlocking America’s next Industrial Revolution and cutting supply-chain timelines across critical industries by 30–50%.
So why not build it?
An Old Tool—Made New
We need a widely trusted vehicle with clear on- and off-ramps that can unlock trillions quickly, minimize taxpayer cost, and give everyday Americans a direct stake in the nation’s growth.
Public-Private Partnerships and Sovereign Wealth Funds are good for a handful of big, strategic bets. But rebuilding a capital-intensive industrial base almost from scratch demands fast, scalable financing for thousands of shops and startups—with government-backed confidence that crowds in private capital now, not years from now.
Today, every deal is bespoke, stitched together with guarantees, insurance, and layers of risk protection. But across every sector: medical devices, telecom, energy, aerospace, defense, the choke points are the same:
Materials. Feedstock. Processing. Fabrication. Precision manufacturing.
Refineries. Steel mills. Casting foundries. Forges. Machine shops. Sheet metal shops. Welding and stamping lines. Tool & die shops. Assembly floors.
These are cash-flowing businesses, over-queued and undercapitalized. Why structure protections deal by deal when we can systematize them—saving builders and investors time, cost, and complexity?
The answer? Bonds.
$1 trillion issuance. Not deficit bonds—productive bonds.
A new class of 3–5 year instruments. Safe. Government-backed. Paying Americans 6–9% yields with upside. Call them Industrial Base Treasuries (IBTs), for now.
But unlike deficit spending, the proceeds flow into appreciating assets—refineries, mills, shops, factories, automation, and industrial startups—the entire industrial backbone.
Capital Allocation:
80% → working capital & automation loans for proven, purchase-order-backed businesses
20% → high-potential industrial startups advancing critical technology
Equity kicker → 2% taxpayer stake so the public shares in the upside
Safe yield today. National upside tomorrow.
Private credit loans often carry rates in the teens, so a single-digit yield on a de-risked, collateral-backed IBT is competitive for owners and attractive for investors.
And the leverage is enormous: at a 3.5-5% reserve ratio, the same range used in existing federal programs, just ~$141 billion in reserves could unlock $3 trillion in financing for America’s industrial base.
Mitigate Risk: Guarantees & Insurance
The goal is discipline. Every loan should be secured by real assets, purchase orders (POs), and, where possible, confirmed receivables from creditworthy end customers:
Federal buyers: Department of Defense and other agencies
Prime contractors & OEMs: Lockheed, GE, Siemens, Intel, etc.
Anchor customers: Utilities, hyperscalers, hospitals, major infrastructure developers
Once this collateral base is established, we layer in two key enablers to make lending bankable at scale:
Risk-Sharing Tools:
Government Guarantees: Full guarantees when the end customer is the U.S. government—similar to an FHA-backed mortgage. Lenders know the government stands behind it, so risk is minimal.
OEM/Anchor Guarantees + Credit Insurance: When the end customer is a prime, OEM, utility, or other major commercial buyer, lenders receive a partial guarantee from that anchor. Further default protection comes from government-backed credit insurance—which works a bit like private-mortgage insurance for lenders. Covering roughly 90–95% of commercial risk and up to 100% of political risk (with premiums typically paid by the exporter or, in financed deals, the lender).
The Data Layer
To give shops confidence about when and where to expand and to help lenders underwrite at speed while reducing fraud, we embed a real-time data layer that connects:
Purchase orders, backlogs, and receivables
Verified shop visits and production-capacity data
Payment platform integrations
Predictive analytics
This layer creates a shared source of truth—a living picture of supply chain health— for both lenders and suppliers.
For shops: It signals real demand, helping them decide when to buy equipment, hire, and add shifts, with confidence they’ll have the orders to support that investment.
For lenders: It provides transparency and real-time risk monitoring, enabling faster financing at better rates.
The result is a system that scales proactively rather than reactively, reducing bottlenecks, shortening lead times, and aligning capital with production capacity across entire sectors—similar to how China’s data-driven credit systems dramatically expand borrowing power for small businesses while mitigating defaults.
U.S. Programs—But Too Narrow
The U.S. already has proven playbooks for mobilizing private capital, just not for its domestic industrial base.
EXIM Bank lets exporters borrow against purchase orders by providing guarantees, credit insurance, and working-capital support.
SBA guarantees 50–85% of small-business loans, allowing banks to serve higher-risk borrowers.
DOE’s Loan Programs Office finances first-of-a-kind energy projects—famously helping Tesla scale production—and has returned a net profit to taxpayers.
FHA, VA, and USDA mortgage programs have unlocked trillions in private housing finance by protecting lenders from default risk and making 30-year fixed-rate mortgages possible.
Together, these programs prove that credit guarantees work. But they are siloed: EXIM is limited to exports, SBA caps loan sizes and focuses on services, DOE is climate-specific, and housing programs stop at real estate.
Global Precedent
Other countries run this playbook at national scale. China’s Sinosure insures hundreds of billions in working-capital and equipment loans, tightly coordinating banks, insurers, and exporters to drive rapid scale-up. China can go even further by subsidizing premiums and absorbing losses, advantages the U.S. may not fully replicate, but the underlying mechanism is universal.
South Korea runs a multi-agency system:
K-SURE backs trade credit insurance and guarantees.
KODIT and KIBO guarantee 80–90% of loans for manufacturers and tech startups, turning OEM-backed POs into bankable collateral.
Together, these programs form a safety net that de-risks lending and accelerates industrial growth.
The U.S. Gap
This is a scale and coordination problem—not a capability problem. FHA, VA, and USDA already enable tens of trillions in private mortgage lending and currently insure over $8 trillion in outstanding mortgages. This is why Americans enjoy 30-year fixed-rate loans—and why housing is one of the deepest credit markets on earth.
But housing is unusually liquid: homes can be resold, foreclosed, and securitized—making lenders comfortable. Industrial assets are far less liquid, which makes a guarantee program even more critical. Without a backstop, lenders either refuse to finance factories and specialized equipment or charge prohibitive rates.
Meanwhile, industrial credit programs remain minuscule. EXIM authorized just $10.8 billion in 2023, compared with China’s Sinosure at ~$700 billion and Korea’s K-SURE at $113 billion. SBA and DOE LPO help, but they cover only a fraction of the need.
What’s missing is a domestic industrial equivalent of FHA or EXIM—a guarantee and credit-insurance engine that turns purchase orders from OEMs, utilities, and federal agencies into bankable collateral. The capital exists—trillions sit idle in private credit funds and bank balance sheets—but without a risk-sharing mechanism, it never reaches the shops, refineries, and startups building America’s industrial future.
Make Industrial Startups Bankable
In my article Stop Using Equity to Buy Steel, I argued that private credit is the most efficient and non-dilutive way to fund industrial buildouts—but only if we de-risk those loans at the system level. That means giving lenders tools they already trust: credit insurance, portfolio bundling of cash-flowing CapEx assets, government guarantees, and aligned incentives across stakeholders.
Even roll-ups of metal shops and other “boring businesses” can serve as collateral pools—creating a financing bridge that supports the next wave of industrial innovation.
IBTs, layered with guarantees and credit insurance, give private credit investors exactly that bridge. They transform individual deals into a diversified, de-risked asset class, allowing lenders to take on slightly more risk in other parts of their portfolio.
Government-backed credit insurance should extend to industrial startups advancing critical technologies. That coverage—combined with pooled collateral and partial guarantees—lets private-credit funds confidently finance earlier-stage, CapEx-heavy companies they would normally avoid—and to do so at scale.
Together, these tools create a structured safety net that makes industrial startups bankable, unlocking ~$2 trillion in private lending for America’s industrial base. And because the public should share in the upside, the U.S. government could take a small equity stake (e.g., 2%) in startups receiving credit insurance—a national dividend on future growth.
The Scale—and the Opportunity
The world faces a massive infrastructure gap: BlackRock’s Larry Fink puts the need at $68 trillion by 2040, while McKinsey estimates $106 trillion.
That’s the scale of the gap.
Meanwhile, U.S. private-capital markets most relevant to this challenge total roughly $6 trillion:
Venture Capital: $800 billion
Private Credit: $2 trillion
Private Equity: $3.2 trillion
Global totals are still only ~$11.4 trillion:
Venture Capital: $1.4 trillion
Private Credit: $3 trillion
Private Equity: $7 trillion
The mismatch is staggering.
But the good news: the money is already there.
$43 trillion in retirement accounts
$53 trillion in household stock-market assets
$28 trillion parked in Treasuries (earning ~4%)
Even a $1 trillion IBT issuance would represent just ~2% of the $50 trillion U.S. bond market—big enough to matter, small enough to avoid distorting yields.
IBTs don’t just solve a single shop’s $800 thousand cash crunch—they create a national credit engine capable of cycling trillions into the productive backbone of the economy, at scale and speed.
This isn’t theory. China does it today. America did it under Hamilton. We even saw a microcosm with clean energy: when solar became bankable for infrastructure funds, the industry took off.
We can do it again. This time for America’s industrial base.
Output
Every $1 issued could generate $5–10 in economic output.
That means $1 trillion in bonds could unlock $5–10 trillion in systemic growth.
Market potential: a $3–5 trillion+ asset class over time (like munis or corporates) could produce $15-50 trillion in economic growth.
Studies of manufacturing multipliers (BEA, McKinsey, World Bank) show 5–10× downstream effects for heavy industry & energy CapEx.
How This Only Costs ~$141 Billion
The U.S. government is not required to hold reserves against Treasury bonds it issues.
In this model, it only needs to hold a small reserve ratio against guaranteed loans— about 3.5%—the same ratio used today by programs such as the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), which already backs some funds investing in early-stage industrial startups.
Example: The Export-Import Bank (EXIM) Act of 1945 requires EXIM to hold reserves of at least 5% of its outstanding loans, guarantees, and insurance. These reserves are calculated under the Federal Credit Reform Act (FCRA) using risk assessments, default histories, and economic forecasts.
EXIM’s model is largely self-sustaining. It funds operations through fees, premiums, and interest collected from borrowers and exporters—often generating a net surplus for the U.S. Treasury. From 1992 through FY2023, EXIM contributed a cumulative ~$9B net surplus after expenses, reserves, and losses.
Cost Estimate for IBTs
For our model, we assume a 3.5% reserve ratio for guarantees and a 5% reserve ratio for credit insurance to be conservative—likely higher than required—since IBT businesses will mostly be cash-flowing, asset/PO/end-customer-backed and, for industrial startups, private lenders will hold IBTs alongside their loans, balancing portfolio risk.
$1 trillion IBTs issued
60% assumed federal end-customer exposure → eligible for full guarantees
40% assumed commercial end-customer exposure → requires credit insurance
Combined with $2 trillion of private credit lending to critical industrial startups, we get:
Government Guarantess (IBTs)
$600 billion x 3.5% reserve → $21 billion cost
Credit Insurance (IBTs)
$400 billion x 5% reserve → $20 billion cost
Credit Insurance (Private Credit)
$2 trillion x 5% reserve → $100 billion cost
Total Reserve / Loss Provision Required: ~$141 billion
This reserve pool would unlock $3 trillion+ in financing for America’s industrial base.
Additional Risk Mitigation: Private insurers could be incentivized to offer co-insurance, further reducing public exposure.
Discussions with OSC personnel indicate that ~$200 billion of lending over four years is already approved and that its legal framework is broad—explicitly written to include entire supply chains (e.g., facilities builders, energy providers, storage providers, precision manufacturing, etc.).
Key Insight: Because OSC dollars are already authorized, new congressional appropriations aren’t required—only frameworks and implementation authority.
Implementation
Roughly $200 billion is already congressionally approved and earmarked for critical technologies. These funds can serve as the seed capital.
The next step is building the frameworks and capital channels to scale this nationally.
Key Milestones & Timeline
Assemble a $1 trillion purchase-order-book – 6–9 months
Stand up new OSC units and qualification infrastructure – 6–9 months
Deploy data & analytics layer for PO verification and real-time underwriting – 6–12 months
Launch guarantees and credit insurance programs – 6–12 months (faster if leveraging existing authorities)
Secure congressional approval for capital channels, OSC structures, and bond issuance – 12–16 months
Execution Confidence
Based on conversations with metal processors, factory owners, academic labs, trade associations, industry alliances, vendor networks and marketplaces, workforce development groups, founders, investors, lenders, developers, defense contractors, DoD organizations, think tanks, government leaders, and policymakers, it’s clear the ecosystem is ready to move. I’m confident that assembling a $1 trillion purchase order book within 6–9 months is realistic.
Some elements could even be green-lit earlier via Executive Order, accelerating the timeline further.
Bipartisan Support
This isn’t partisan. When I met congressional staffers working on industrial-base legislation, it was a bipartisan team—one Democrat and one Republican—underscoring that rebuilding capacity is a national priority, not a wedge.
Tariffs or not, this is one of the rare initiatives that has carried forward seamlessly from the Biden administration into the Trump administration—a sign of how urgent and unifying the mission has become.
Additional Risks to Consider
1. Misallocation of Capital
Cheap money can fuel bubbles—we saw it in the 2010s. IBTs are not about spraying liquidity; they’re about precision allocation to productive assets, with cash flows that cycle back to pay down debt.
2. Market Distortion
Some worry a new bond program could distort the Treasury market. This program is deliberately sized to complement, not disrupt, existing capital markets.
3. Government Overreach
Critics will raise concerns about overreach or capture. Hamilton faced the same critique; his answer wasn’t control. It was coordination, aligning public credit with long-term national interest. We must do the same, without authoritarian shortcuts or distortionary, open-ended subsidies.
4. Qualification & Execution Risk
If we fail to build strong qualification teams and infrastructure, we risk defaults and losses that could undermine confidence.
Due diligence matters. Confirming receivables or validating POs is complex; not all POs are bankable, especially for smaller suppliers or startups. We’ll invite expert input from founders, investors, operators, and academic labs within an independent, transparent checks-and-balances process so no party advances its own interests unchecked.
Anchor guarantees are not universal. Partial guarantees from OEMs or utilities are common in aerospace and energy but depend on buyer willingness and deal structure. Some primes (e.g., Boeing) will guarantee supplier loans tied to major programs; smaller OEMs may not. Securing buy-in is critical.
5. Lessons from Solar
The solar “takeoff” showed how subsidies alone can misfire—overcapacity and trade wars. This time is different: demand for turbines, transformers, data centers, and critical components already exceeds supply, and millions of skilled workers are nearing retirement. If we don’t build now, programs stall and America falls behind.
6. Supporting Conditions for Success
Regulatory reform: streamline procurement, regulation and permitting to remove friction.
Workforce development: train and empower skilled workers on a national level to meet demand.
Liquidity for scale: support growth of secondary marketplaces for private-company shares to provide exits, price discovery, and capital recycling; legislation may be needed to expand access and ensure transparency.
The Opportunity
The builders, the knowledge, the workforce—and the capital—are already here. The task is to direct resources with surgical precision toward choke points that move the needle fastest. Unlike deficit spending, most dollars here are secured by productive assets—factories, automation, supply chains—that generate tax revenue and strengthen the government’s balance sheet over time.
Built-In Incentives
This loop works because everyone wins:
Factories & suppliers upload POs → receive working capital and automation financing to grow.
Startups take loans → scale faster, shorten lead times, and cross the Valley of Death.
Primes & OEMs guarantee contracts → secure throughput, stabilize supply chains, and meet delivery schedules.
Developers & utilities build sites and grid capacity → unlock energy and infrastructure needed for growth.
Investors & lenders buy bonds and finance startups → earn attractive yields on pre-structured, de-risked deals while rebuilding the industrial base.
Workers gain higher wages, job security, and training → buy homes, raise families, and build lasting careers.
Communities attract new factories and infrastructure → create jobs, grow local tax bases, and revitalize regions.
Academia & training institutions close the skills gap → align curricula with industry needs and accelerate tech transfer.
Trade associations & alliances → coordinate standards, share best practices, and drive adoption.
Federal, state & local government enact frameworks → create jobs, unlock tax revenue, pay down debt, and strengthen national-security resilience.
The common thread: growth.
When every player—from the shop floor to Wall Street and D.C.—is aligned, capital flows, projects move sooner, and the economy compounds. Because incentives are built in rather than imposed, participation becomes the obvious choice.
Where Did This Come From?
I know what you’re thinking:
Did I just give Hamilton’s financial system a facelift?
I’ll admit—I fell asleep during the Hamilton play. Twice.
But when I started mapping 50 hard-tech startups, their 600+ investors, and who they funded, I noticed something troubling: the most capital-intensive startups—transportation innovation and heavy infrastructure, the backbone of a resilient supply chain—weren’t getting funded at the scale they needed.
Many private-credit investors told me they were willing to fund earlier. The barrier wasn’t appetite—it was making deals bankable at scale so thousands of businesses could be financed quickly, not one-off.
At the top levels of government and industry, I kept hearing about the worker shortage.
Yet factory owners kept repeating a deeper pain point: no clear demand guarantee to justify expansion—and no working capital or equipment financing to make it happen even if they wanted to.
These are cash-flowing businesses, yet they can’t take larger orders without capital—and we don’t even have enough factories to fill the orders already on the books. Worse, many were closing—taking critical knowledge and capacity with them.
It hit me hard when two factory founders doing $50–$100M in annual revenue told me their biggest headache was still working capital.
That made me obsessed with two questions:
How do we package risk-sharing tools so they act like a turbocharger for private credit—building lender confidence, cutting down underwriting time and enabling lenders to finance industrial startups earlier and at scale?
How do we leverage backlogged, cash-flowing materials and feedstock, processing, fabrication, and precision manufacturing businesses as collateral—de-risking the system and unlocking trillions in capital from big institutions and everyday Americans?
America, I realized, essentially needed a vertically integrated credit engine to finance industrial startups.
The vehicle had to be trusted, simple, and easy to adopt.
The conclusion was unmistakable: Bonds.
By then, I had studied Hamilton’s closed-loop system and China’s financial architecture—but I hadn’t fully grasped the genius of the Sinking Fund. Hamilton used bonds to solve three problems at once: working capital, investor confidence, and national debt. Realizing that confirmed what my gut had been telling me all along: I wasn’t crazy.
Or at least, not in that way.
The Best Solution
If I’m honest, this likely is not the final solution—but it’s a starting point.
What I do know is this: if we keep doing one-off deals like MP Materials or Intel—as amazing and critical as they are—we will never mobilize capital fast enough to fund the thousands of industrial startups and small businesses we need to win the AI and energy race, preserve our way of life, and avoid a fiscal crisis.
We need system-level solutions that scale shops and startups together, not piecemeal. We need a closed-loop credit ecosystem that lends at scale and cycles revenue back toward paying down the national debt.
We need to inject trillions into rebuilding America’s industrial base—efficiently and urgently.
If we get this right, we can cut critical supply chain timelines by 30–50%.
When the government is the buyer, loans can be simple and fully guaranteed. When the buyer is commercial, layered protections make deals bankable.
With Industrial Base Treasuries and private credit, capital can flow into the industrial base—funding innovation, expanding capacity, and offering more competitive compensation for American factory workers. This is how we start to close the loop on America’s next industrial revival.
The intention of my writing is to spark a conversation that brings us closer to the truth—and to the best path forward as a nation.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’m very good at asking the right questions.
And together, we can design the solution this moment needs.
The Urgency
Today, we face the same crossroads Hamilton did—except this time, the stakes are higher.
America has offshored much of its industrial base. Our structural challenges are more complex. And the race for AI and energy is sharper than ever.
The financial system we have today isn’t designed to build thousands of industrial startups—let alone lay the foundation for an entirely new industrial era.
As Ray Dalio warns:
“...it is now the case that whichever country wins the technology and economic wars will win the more important geopolitical and possibly military wars.
…
The credit circulatory system is like the human circulatory system in that it brings nutrients to different parts of the body. If the credit and debt are used to create income that is large enough to service the debt, then the system is working well and healthy. But if the debt and debt service expenditures grow faster than the incomes, they build up like plaque that squeezes out other spending.”
and Jamie Dimon:
“Sustaining America’s position of power requires major changes in the funding and planning of our military. This includes major changes in trade, production capacity and supply chains to make our military as resilient and capable as possible.”
The money is there.
We still have a chance to fix this—to turn public credit into a flywheel for growth, not a weight of debt.
The question is whether we will act—together—with the resolve that built America’s first Industrial Renaissance, before the window closes.
Many of us already know the answer.
We refuse to lose.
We are reindustrializing America.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
If you have ideas to make this stronger—financially, legally, culturally, or strategically—I want to hear from you.
Whether you’re a creative, founder, investor, lender, lawyer, academic, policymaker, or simply someone who cares about rebuilding America’s industrial base, I’d love to connect and turn this vision into reality.
P.S. I’m also hosting Factories of the Future events across the country—bringing together founders, investors, government, students, and media to accelerate startup funding at scale and inspire the next generation to build, sign up at same link above.
Fantastic work! A must read. Love the Industrial Bond idea