Will the US Government Really Start Buying Stocks? Checking Cem Karsan's "Big Print" Call

OCTOBER 8, 2026, 9:40 PM

A video titled "They Have to Print Trillions" and subtitled with a 35% V-shaped crash went around this week, along with a post saying the US government buying stocks outright "could be months away." The video is a 69-minute interview. I read an automatic transcript of all of it, which I made myself with speech-to-text software, so any wording in quotes below is worth checking against the video before you repeat it. The title promises that they have to. About an hour in, the speaker calls his own forecast "a pretty big call." That gap is the story.

Natalie Brunell (Coin Stories) interviews Cem Karsan, a former options market maker who now runs a fund. Watch on YouTube.

What He Is Actually Claiming

1. Five pressures corner Washington (4:33 to 15:00). Populism, inflation, a debt he calls unsustainable, a stock market he calls too big to fail, and competition with China.
2. The only way out is to print and buy stocks (16:30 to 19:00). He expects a sovereign wealth fund, Trump accounts and Treasury bond buybacks to be steps toward it. His precedents are Japan and Norway.
3. It needs a crisis first (20:00 to 26:00). No crisis before the midterms, he argues, because the administration wants calm markets going into them. Then a window from the election until roughly June 2027.
4. His base case for the crash (54:30). A drop of 25 to 35 percent, somewhere between the April 2025 tariff drop and the COVID crash, over in three months or less, "probably one or two months," followed by a V-shaped recovery once the facilities are switched on.

The Headline Is Bolder Than the Interview

The clip that opens the video has him saying it is "coming in the next three to six months" and that "we're going there in the next nine months." The full interview adds several things the clip leaves out.

• He says the fund will not appear at full size overnight: "I don't think they're going to go to a $10 trillion sovereign wealth on tomorrow. Can it be $5 trillion but then two years? Yes." (55:45)
• He separates what he thinks the government wants from what will happen: "It is what I think they want to do. It's important distinction." (61:24)
• He calls the short-term crisis scenario "a fringe outcome" and says putting his name behind it "is a pretty big call." (64:00)
• He gives himself a deadline. If it has not started by "April, May, June," he does not believe they will execute the plan. (64:43)

So the claim is not "the government buys stocks in months." It is "a crash after the midterms, then a backstop, then gradual buying over years," with a stated expiry date. That is a more careful forecast than the title, and it is the one worth testing.

What Checks Out

The US government has started taking equity stakes. In August 2025 the US agreed to buy a 9.9% stake in Intel for $8.9 billion, paid for with money the chipmaker was already owed in CHIPS Act and related grants. The Defense Department also took a $400 million preferred stake in the rare-earth miner MP Materials. Karsan calls this "boiling the frog" (19:30). You can disagree with the metaphor and still accept the underlying fact: it is new for a US administration outside a crisis.

Paulson did warn about the Treasury market. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spoke to Bloomberg on April 15, 2026. Bloomberg's headline was that the US should prepare for a "vicious" bond crash, and reports said he urged a pre-planned "break the glass" toolkit. Karsan reads this as a trial balloon cleared with Treasury (21:00 to 22:00). That is his inference, and there is a complication: the Paulson Institute published a statement on April 16 titled "Statement on the Inaccuracy of Bloomberg Story." I could see the title and date but not what it disputes, so I cannot say which parts of the coverage it contests.

The Bank of Japan really did buy stock. Karsan says Japan "owns 8% of the Nikkei" (17:23). That is within the range of published estimates, but the number depends on how you measure it. Reported figures run from about 3% of total market value (a 2017 Société Générale estimate), through 5.8% of the Tokyo first section (2020) and around 7% (a Bloomberg estimate repeated on a trading site), to more than 10% of the free float (a University of Tokyo working paper, March 2021).

What Does Not Follow

• The precedents do not match the plan. The Bank of Japan is a central bank buying exchange-traded funds. Norway's $2.6 trillion fund is paid for by oil revenue and does not print money to buy shares. Karsan's plan is a US executive-branch fund buying stocks with newly created money, which is neither of those. And by one secondhand report, the Bank of Japan announced in September 2025 that it would start selling its ETFs, so the model he cites is being unwound.
• The legal path goes unaddressed. The Federal Reserve Act's Section 14 lists what Reserve Banks may buy: government and agency debt, certain municipal and foreign government debt, bills of exchange, acceptances and gold. Corporate stock is not on the list. I did not research whether another route exists, such as a Treasury-run fund with money from Congress or from borrowing, and he does not say how it would be funded or authorized.
• It argues against itself. He says that negative real interest rates risk a 1970s-style inflation spiral (37:57 to 40:00), possibly "Turkey"-style. The plan he predicts depends on holding rates below inflation without the spiral. He admits the risk (62:22). He does not explain how it is avoided.
• It can't lose. He describes the April 2025 tariff shock and other market scares as "manufactured" crises that set up a pattern (23:25 to 24:45). If every crisis is evidence of the plan and the absence of one is evidence that they're waiting, no market outcome would count against it. His own April to June 2027 deadline is the one clean test he offers.
• "The only solution" is not an argument. He tells viewers to put the five pressures into an AI model and see (16:34). A model asked a leading question will happily agree. It would not establish that this is what policymakers will do.

What I Could Not Check

Several of his numbers are striking and I did not verify any of them: that 45% of S&P 500 stocks had a negative one-year beta to the index (9:30), that the top 6% of the index alone would put it at 4,400 (10:25), that roughly $50 trillion of "collateral" was created in two months (7:00), and that a Carlyle Group report attributes about 100% of earnings growth to market gains (11:06). Treat them as his claims until someone sources them.

What Would Settle It

Three things are observable, in rough order of how soon. First, whether any law or executive order names a funding source and a legal home for a federal stock-buying fund. Second, whether a Treasury-market backstop of the Paulson kind is formally proposed or announced. Third, his own deadline, which runs out between April and June 2027. A rising market, a bond selloff and a crisis rhetoric cycle can each happen without any of those three.

Where I Could Be Wrong

• The transcript. It is machine-made with a small speech-recognition model. It garbled names and some words (it rendered the Strait of Hormuz as "straight up for moves," for example). Every quote and timestamp above should be checked against the video before being repeated.
• The Intel and MP Materials figures. These come from news coverage summarized by a search tool, not from the company filings or the government announcements.
• The Bank of Japan. The ownership estimates are from different years and measures. The report of a sell-down comes from a single secondary blog post, and I did not check the Bank of Japan's own statement or its current holdings.
• The Federal Reserve Act. I read the Federal Reserve's own page for Section 14 and saw no mention of stock. I did not read Section 13(3) emergency lending powers or any other statute, so "stocks are not on the list" is not the same as "the law forbids every route."
• Paulson. I did not read Bloomberg's story or the Paulson Institute's statement in full, so I do not know whether the disputed part is the one Karsan relies on.
• His intent. I am describing what he said, in his order, with his own caveats. I did not interview him, and I am not saying he is wrong about the pressures on Washington. The pressures are real. The jump from there to a specific plan on a specific timetable is the part I could not support.
• The trade ideas he gives near the end (put options, gold, certain currencies) are his. None of this is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and it is not a forecast of where any market is headed.

Sources

• Natalie Brunell, Coin Stories, interview with Cem Karsan (YouTube, 69 minutes); announcement post on X, October 6, 2026
• Bloomberg, "Paulson says US should prepare for vicious bond crash," April 16, 2026
• Paulson Institute press releases, including "Statement on the Inaccuracy of Bloomberg Story," April 16, 2026 (title and date only; I could not read the text)
• Al Jazeera, "Trump says US to take 10 percent stake in Intel," August 22, 2025
• Foreign Policy, "What to Know About Trump's Deal With Intel," August 27, 2025
• Federal Reserve Board, Federal Reserve Act, Section 14 (open market operations)
• Asia Economy, Bank of Japan ETF purchases and share of the market, 2020
• Bloomberg, "BOJ Is More Minnow Than Whale in Japan Stocks, SocGen Finds," June 2017
• University of Tokyo working paper on the Bank of Japan's ETF holdings, 2021
• Bill Mitchell, "Bank of Japan's ETF sell-off is a sideshow" (the report of the September 2025 sell-down announcement; secondary)