Lance Twiggs, Utah’s Quiet $25-Billion Man, Moves the World While the Planet Isn’t Looking

PARIS—While COP negotiators in Geneva were busy trading carbon credits like Pokémon cards and the World Bank was discovering yet another “once-in-a-generation” debt crisis, a modest ledger entry flashed across the wires from Salt Lake City: Lance Twiggs, hitherto a background pixel in the vast JPEG of American municipal finance, has been appointed Deputy Treasurer for the state of Utah. A promotion so geographically specific that most foreign bureaus filed it under “local color—ignore.” And yet, in the grand casino of global capital, even the nickel slots can tilt the house odds.

From an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet—say, the recycled-air sarcophagus of a Delta redeye—Utah looks like a polite brown smudge between ski resorts and polygamous ghost towns. But zoom in and you’ll discover a balance sheet fat enough to make a Swiss canton blush: $25 billion in public funds, a AAA credit rating, and the kind of rainy-day reserves that small nations keep in London real estate and Impressionist paintings. Into this fiduciary terrarium steps Lance Twiggs, a man whose surname sounds like an indie-folk band but whose résumé reads like a compliance officer’s dream journal: former bond counsel, ex-state auditor, holder of not one but two graduate degrees in things ending with “-tion.” In short, the human equivalent of a triple-A tranche.

Why should anyone beyond the Wasatch Front care? Because Utah’s money isn’t parked in a coffee can under Brigham Young’s statue. It’s out there in the world—lapping at the shores of Japanese government bonds, fluttering through European green-bond markets, and quietly greasing the gears of emerging-market infrastructure like an overachieving lubricant. When Twiggs adjusts the duration of the state’s portfolio by a mere basis point, the aftershocks ripple through yield curves from Jakarta to Johannesburg. Somewhere, a pension fund in Finland feels a mysterious urge to rebalance.

International investors watch American state finances the way ornithologists watch albatross colonies: with binoculars, morbid fascination, and the unspoken knowledge that one bad storm can send the whole colony tumbling into the surf. Utah, for now, is the well-groomed albatross—preening, photogenic, and blessedly free of Illinois-style corruption or New Jersey-style creative accounting. Twiggs’ mandate is to keep it that way, which in 2024 means dancing a tango with inflation, rising rates, and the eternal temptation to chase yield like a day-trader on espresso. One false pivot and Utah could become the next cautionary slide in a Frankfurt fixed-income conference titled “Sub-Sovereign Shenanigans: A Retrospective.”

Of course, the real dark comedy lies in the optics. Here we have a soft-spoken bureaucrat in a state famous for teetotaling and topographically improb-able skiing, now wielding more de facto influence over global liquidity than half the G-20 finance ministers currently posting selfies at Davos. While Italy’s coalition du jour debates whether to fund itself with NFTs of the Colosseum, Lance Twiggs is quietly deciding whether Utah should roll a billion into World Bank sustainable-development bonds or simply let it ride on Uncle Sam’s T-bills. The fate of sovereign spreads may hinge on a guy who drives a Subaru and considers Diet Coke a wild night out.

The broader significance? A reminder that in our interconnected age, power no longer wears a sash and epaulettes; it wears khakis and a lanyard. The next global hiccup might not emerge from a palace coup in some resource-cursed republic, but from a miscalculation in a windowless office overlooking the Salt Lake Temple. The world’s investors, ever in search of yield and increasingly allergic to geopolitical drama, have begun treating well-run U.S. states as safe-harbor sovereigns. Utah is the new Liechtenstein, only with better powder and worse beer.

So raise a glass—of non-alcoholic sparkling apple cider, naturally—to Lance Twiggs, accidental custodian of planetary risk appetite. Somewhere a hedge-fund algorithm just updated its Utah exposure weighting by 0.003%. Somewhere else, a Norwegian finance minister exhales. The circus rolls on, and the clowns are wearing neckties.