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National debt: UBS’s Paul Donovan warns governements will leverage private wealth

Published

2 months ago

November 29, 2025

When examining the flow of wealth in the coming decades, privately wealthy individuals rest in a very healthy position. Their assets have increased in value, their portfolios have performed well, and many are looking to the generations above them for a significant windfall of cash set to come from inheritance.

Governments, with their eye-watering debt burdens and expensive borrowing costs, are eyeing that wealth—and they want in.

Policymakers have leveraged private wealth in the past to pay their way, UBS chief economist Paul Donovan recently told media at a roundtable discussing the economic outlook for 2026—but the question is whether they will use a carrot or a stick to drum up revenue from individuals.

As such, some may prove more popular than others. Donovan said last week: “Governments have long mobilized private wealth to support public finances. There are several approaches. One is to influence market behavior—encouraging individuals to buy government bonds through incentives like tax-free premium bonds, which channel savings directly into state financing. Prudential regulation can also steer pension funds toward domestic government debt, as seen in the UK after 1945, when a debt-to-GDP ratio of 240% was successfully reduced over decades.”

It is this debt-to-GDP ratio that has economists so concerned, rather than the volume of debt itself. After all, the ratio is a useful indicator of whether an economy is growing fast enough to generate the revenues necessary to repay its debts—or the interest payments on its debts—to lenders. If the customers buying a government’s debt feel the ratio is unbalanced, they may demand higher interest to offset the risk and so push the government’s budget even further.

To increase the supply of debt buyers—with individuals motivated by a tax-free incentive, for example—allows governments to borrow more without facing higher market interest.

However, there are other, less popular ways to raise revenue to pay off the debt. “More contentious options exist,” added Donovan, “Such as taxing wealth through capital gains or inheritance levies. In practice, the initial focus tends to be on financial repression—using tax incentives or regulation to direct money into government bonds—before moving toward wealth taxation.”

A timely wealth transfer

Inheritance levies will be of significant interest in the era of the Great Wealth Transfer, with $80 trillion due to change hands over the next 20 years, according to UBS. Some studies put that figure even higher, saying as much as $124 trillion will be passed down from older generations to their younger counterparts.

Donovan has previously warned that politicians will likely be wondering how this shift could help revive their own fortunes. The chief economist said in a video last month: “It seems unrealistic to suppose that governments will just sit idly by as this wealth moves around. We would expect governments to attempt to mobilize that wealth to help fund their debt, but in doing so, that denies private sector investment access to some of those funds.”

With global public debt now surpassing $100 trillion, politicians and the public alike are growing increasingly concerned about the issue. While economists have described President Trump’s methods as “peculiar,” there is no doubt that his tariff regime has brought billions to Uncle Sam’s bottom line.

The White House has also suggested selling “gold cards” to wealthy would-be immigrants, with Trump saying it would be “nice” to offset some of the debt with the proceeds. That being said, this idea was tabled in February with more details promised to emerge within the fortnight—no such small print has been confirmed.

The U.K.’s Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has adopted a different approach—potentially more in line with the policies Donovan has suggested. In a pre-budget speech a few weeks ago, Reeves made it clear that individuals will be called on to play their part in the wider fiscal trajectory.

“If we are to build the future of Britain together, we will all have to contribute to that effort,” she said. “Each of us must do our bit for the security of our country and the brightness of its future. There is a reward for getting these decisions right, to build more resilient public finances—with the headroom to withstand global turbulence.”

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Business

Khosla-backed Formulary raises oversubscribed $4.6 million seed round for its AI-powered private fund manager software

Published

21 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Alfia Ilicheva came from the world of public markets, including four years at one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater. But when she transitioned over to the private side, including serving as the CEO of an Apollo-backed investment platform, she realized the difficulty of fund administration for operations like private equity and venture capital. Instead of having access to real-time and accurate data like at Bridgewater, which can rely on publicly available information, this new world was filled with manually compiled and fragmented data subject to human error and inconsistent metrics. “How could it be that hedge funds are so into the future and private capital markets are so backward,” she remembers thinking.

As private markets explode and AI makes automation increasingly possible, Ilicheva saw an opportunity to build the next generation of fund administration software for everyone from venture capital outfits to PE giants like Apollo. After initially planning to bootstrap the project, which she named Formulary, Ilicheva was introduced to Hari Arul, a partner at Khosla Ventures, who immediately saw the appeal of the idea. Khosla is leading Formulary’s $4.6 million seed round, which Ilicheva says is three times oversubscribed, with participation from Human Ventures, Serena Williams’s venture firm, and others.

In the red-hot field of private investments, buoyed by the rise of private credit and massively valued companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, fund administration may not be the most alluring area for innovation. But the ability to track investments, returns, and performance—and accurately convey the information to investors, or limited partners—is a necessary foundation.

The existing options fall into two camps: the service side, or high-touch accounting companies, like SS&C and Citco, or the software side, like Carta. As Ilicheva interviewed general partners and former clients in her user research, she realized that nearly everyone was dissatisfied with the existing options to the point that most turned to shadow fund administration, where they would hire outside firms but keep their own books at the same time. “When you raise a fund, your dream is to generate alpha by investing capital, not redoing someone’s work,” Ilicheva said.

Ilicheva planned to find a happy medium between the two models by leveraging AI to massively scale up the service approach, creating software for their own in-house accountants, which Ilicheva playfully calls bionic accountants. “They’re really focused on having a grip on the numbers and delivering service, but they’re not manually entering things in an Excel spreadsheet, which has been the industry’s burden for the past decades,” she said.

The challenge in creating a tech-enabled services company, of course, is scale, with a pure SaaS model able to grow at a much faster clip. When I asked Khosla’s Arul how he thought about the approach, he said the key is to deliver the vast majority of the product through technology: “It’s important for any entrepreneur or any investor to look at an AI-enabled services business and say, the margin of how this business runs looks more like a technology company than a services company.”

Arul said that while Khosla is not yet using Formulary, which is just now coming out of stealth, he’s optimistic for a future where tedious processes like ensuring data accuracy for LPs can be fully, reliably automated. Ilicheva mentioned one possible future use case for Formulary as drafting LP letters, which Arul wholeheartedly endorsed, along with a portal where investors could communicate directly with the system to understand the value of positions, fund deployment, and future capital calls. “[That] sounds pie in the sky relative to what the reality is today,” Arul said, “But it doesn’t feel out of reach.”

Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com

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Business

Leaders at Davos are obsessing over how to use AI at scale

Published

2 hours ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune‘s AI editor Jeremy Kahn reports on the AI buzz at Davos
The big story: SCOTUS could upend Trump’s leverage to acquire Greenland.
The markets: Jolted by Trump’s renewed tariff threats.
Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. I’m on the ground in Davos, Switzerland, for this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrival later this week along with a large delegation of U.S. officials eclipses pretty much every other discussion at Davos this year. But, when people here aren’t talking about Trump, they are talking about AI.

At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was pierced by the shock of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if a similar bit of news upends the AI narrative again this year. (There are rumors that DeepSeek is planning to drop another model.) But, barring that, business leaders seem to be less wowed by the hype around AI this year and more concerned with the nitty-gritty of how to implement the technology successfully at scale.

On Monday, Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me the company is using ‘forward deployed engineers’ to tighten feedback loops between customers and product teams. Salesforce is also offering pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers re-engineer their businesses—and avoid getting stuck in “pilot purgatory.”

Meanwhile, at a side event in Davos called A Compass for Europe, that focused on how to restore the continent’s flagging competitiveness, AI was front-and-center. Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of LogicMonitor, told the assembled CEOs that to achieve AI success at scale, companies should take a “top down” approach, with the CEO and leadership identifying the highest value use cases and driving the whole organization to align around achieving them. Neeti Mehta Shukla, the cofounder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said it was critical to move beyond measuring automation’s impact only through the lens of labor savings. She gave specific customer examples where uplifting data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or moving more workers to new tasks, were better metrics than simply looking at cost per unit output. Finally, Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at NEA, said Europe has enough talent and funding to build world-beating AI companies—what it lacks is ambition and willingness to take big bets.

Later, I met with Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process analytics software platform Celonis. He echoed some of these points, telling me that to achieve ROI with AI generally required three things: strong leadership commitment, the establishment of a center of excellence within the business (this led to an 8x higher return than for companies that didn’t do this!), and finally having enough live data connected to the AI platform.

For further AI insights from Davos, check out Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter. Meanwhile, Fortune is hosting a number of events in Davos throughout the week. View that lineup here. And my colleagues will be providing more reporting from Davos to CEO Daily and fortune.com throughout the week.—Jeremy Kahn

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This is the web version of CEO Daily, a newsletter of must-read global insights from CEOs and industry leaders. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.

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Business

Stock market today: Dow futures tumble 400 points on Trump’s tariffs over Greenland, Nobel prize

Published

13 hours ago

January 19, 2026

Jace Porter

U.S. stock futures dropped late Monday after global equities sold off as President Donald Trump launches a trade war against NATO allies over his Greenland ambitions.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones industrial average sank 401 points, or 0.81%. S&P 500 futures were down 0.91%, and Nasdaq futures sank 1.13%.

Markets in the U.S. were closed in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday. Earlier, the dollar dropped as the safe haven status of U.S. assets was in doubt, while stocks in Europe and Asia largely retreated.

On Saturday, Trump said Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland will be hit with a 10% tariff starting on Feb. 1 that will rise to 25% on June 1, until a “Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

The announcement came after those countries sent troops to Greenland last week, ostensibly for training purposes, at the request of Denmark. But late Sunday, a message from Trump to European officials emerged that linked his insistence on taking over Greenland to his failure to be award the Nobel Peace Prize.

The geopolitical impact of Trump’s new tariffs against Europe could jeopardize the trans-Atlantic alliance and threaten Ukraine’s defense against Russia.

But Wall Street analysts were more optimistic on the near-term risk to financial markets, seeing Trump’s move as a negotiating tactic meant to extract concessions.

Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone, described the gambit as “escalate to de-escalate” and pointed out that the timing of his tariff announcement ahead of his appearance at the Davos World Economic Forum this week is likely not a coincidence.

“I’ll leave others to question the merits of that approach, and potential longer-run geopolitical fallout from it, but for markets such a scenario likely means some near-term choppiness as headline noise becomes deafening, before a relief rally in due course when another ‘TACO’ moment arrives,” he said in a note on Monday, referring to the “Trump always chickens out” trade.

Similarly, Jonas Goltermann, deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics, also said “cooler heads will prevail” and downplayed the odds that markets are headed for a repeat of last year’s tariff chaos.

In a note Monday, he said investors have learned to be skeptical about all of Trump’s threats, adding that the U.S. economy remains healthy and markets retain key risk buffers.

“Given their deep economic and financial ties, both the US and Europe have the ability to impose significant pain on each other, but only at great cost to themselves,” Goltermann added. “As such, the more likely outcome, in our view, is that both sides recognize that a major escalation would be a lose-lose proposition, and that compromise eventually prevails. That would be in line with the pattern around most previous Trump-driven diplomatic dramas.”

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