The “private funds” industry is emblematic. Private funds is a catch-all term for venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity firms—the petty tyrants of finance capital. These interests grew explosively during the Biden years. Assets held by these funds grew 34 percent to nearly $28 trillion, almost matching the $31 trillion held in public mutual funds—historically the much bigger type of ownership. The number of private funds grew at an even faster rate, from about 63,000 in 2020 to almost 101,000 in 2024. Company founders and investment partnerships multiplied by the thousands. They form the financial shock troops of the new American gentry, the upper-class backbone of Trumpism. This base tends to be less complacent than the older financial establishment, which not only wants order and stability in international markets but also—at least for a time—publicly supported the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A whole financial Freikorps of private investors, fund managers, and activist shareholders see the Trump administration as a battering ram to smash the regulatory walls guarding the big money, i.e., the enormous pools of savings managed by government-connected fund managers and banks. This includes, for example, some $8 trillion in invested retirement accounts, as well as a bigger share in the roughly $6.1 trillion pool of public pension assets. Even Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complains about alleged central planning under Democratic governments and talks about the need to increase competition and reduce the power of market incumbents—by which he means opening the door to this vault for him and his colleagues. For the financiers backing Trump a raid on big finance could yield a jackpot of billions.