Brad Gerstner explains that the newly-signed Invest America Act sets up private S&P 500-invested savings accounts for every child, seeded with $1,000, open to contributions from parents, companies and philanthropists, and locked until age 18. ✦ AI generated
Brad Gerstner · BG2 Pod · 2025-07-10 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 9:49
“So, why don't you tell everyone the details?”
It creates private investment savings accounts, privately owned for every child at birth, seated with a thousand bucks in the S&P 500. So, parents, companies, philanthropists can add money. Anybody can add money to these accounts. You can't take the money out of the accounts, right? It just compounds in the S&P 500 until you're 18 years old.
verbatim transcript · starts at 9:49
9:30bill. Right. So, a lot of these things got packaged together in this one bill. And of course, it was signed into law on July 4th down at the White House. You know, I've been at this four years. You know, I tried to get it done under Biden, but the stars just aligned in this moment. And and Michael was pretty early to get on board and support this.
9:49joined the CEO council um for Invest America but played a critical role with the president to help get it into the reconciliation bill over the course of the last 60 days. But let's just talk about exactly what it means now that it's become law. So I think of this as a pretty significant evolution in the social contract. It creates private investment savings accounts, privately owned for every child at birth, seated
10:18with a thousand bucks in the S&P 500. So, parents, companies, philanthropists can add money. Anybody can add money to these accounts. You can't take the money out of the accounts, right? It just compounds in the S&P 500 until you're 18 years old. So, we will spend the next year putting the program in place. It has to be launched under the terms of the legislation by July 4th, 2026, the
10:43250th birthday of America. And basically, we got it expanded. So all kids under the age of 18, that's 65 million kids are eligible. And I give a lot of credit to Senator Cruz who fought to expand the pool of eligibility here. So what that means is that they can open up an account, but only children born after January 1, 2025 get the $1,000 from Treasury, right? >> The other the others will have an
11:13account that someone else could put money in on their behalf >> and and they can add money to and there are a lot of advantages for their parents adding money uh for companies adding money to it. So it makes a lot of sense and my for Michael and I I think the key performance indicator here is if we're having this conversation a year from now we want to have 50 or 60
11:33million kids signed up. Now of course if your child is born after July 4th of 2026 then they're going to automatically get an account set up when they get their social security number and they will automatically get the $1,000. But we have this one-time group all kids under the age of 18. We're going to have a big campaign to get all those folks signed up over the course of the next year. And