Collateralizing US government debt (via a sovereign wealth fund) doesn't actually solve the underlying problem if economic growth is insufficient, because if the US cannot grow fast enough to outpace debt growth, it eventually has to hand back the collateral (gold, land, etc.), which voters would resist.

The US currently holds Chinese Imperial bonds and UK World War II loan debt that could theoretically be recovered as an alternative to debt restructuring, though doing so is described as 'uncharted territory' and largely an intellectual curiosity rather than realistic policy.

During the first Trump administration, the Treasury Department investigated ways to extract payouts on Chinese imperial bonds (bonds issued by predecessor Chinese governments) as a way of raising revenue, while simultaneously the SEC was prosecuting someone for selling those same bonds to investors and promising payouts.

Tracy notes that despite Bishop's confidence about Taiwan's future, many people have been confidently predicting China-Taiwan conflict for years and it hasn't happened, suggesting humility about timing predictions

Tracy notes that Robert Armstrong at FT had a major hit with coining the 'TACO' acronym to describe Trump's pattern of making threats but backing down, and Bishop's team published a table showing the same pattern weeks earlier but without catchy marketing

Ozan Tarhan, a Deutsche Bank analyst, forwarded Signum research notes to Tracy Aloway, which led her to start reading and valuing Signum's commentary.

In June 2025, Bishop's base case was that the overwhelming majority of Israel-Iran war scenarios would end in negotiated Iranian capitulation with no meaningful damage to global oil supply or Gulf assets, which he characterizes as a good conclusion to have published given how events actually played out.

Government spending is built on norms—a loan to the government is a promise, which is a human construct embedded with values, narratives, and norms, and we are now in a period where those norms around US debt are beginning to change.

The US can potentially raise additional government revenue by collecting payment on defaulted bonds issued by previous Chinese governments (imperial debt) or the UK still owes the US money from World War II loans; the Treasury explored this during the first Trump administration while simultaneously the SEC was prosecuting people for fraudulently selling these same bonds to retail investors.

A sovereign wealth fund funded by government assets appears to shift the US from issuing unsecured treasuries to issuing secured debt backed by collateral, but this creates an 'incumbrance' problem: there is a finite amount of collateral available relative to $36 trillion in debt, creating questions about what happens if collateral is exhausted or asset values decline.