How to Finance Obama's Social-Innovation Fund

By Lester M. Salamon

As White House officials wrestle with how to secure money from an increasingly tightfisted Congress for the social-innovation fund it approved as part of the new national-service law, they could look to the estimated $5-billion worth of warrants, or options to buy bank stock at set prices, that the federal government acquired when it bailed out the nation's banks in the fall.

Other countries have found creative ways to tap such windfall assets in government hands to generate sizable