How Norway spends its $882B global fund | Hacker News Reader

How Norway spends its $882B global fund

economist.com

283 pointspunnerud157 comments

"It is run frugally and transparently" is a dubious claim, at least according to claims made on NRKs Folkeopplysningen (a show like Penn and Teller: Bullshit, just better).

The fund spends a lot on being actively managed, one manager received ~$60 million in bonuses in 2010. However, they won't reply when people ask if bonuses are actually financially beneficial.

https://tv.nrk.no/serie/folkeopplysningen/KMTE50009215/seson... @ 28:30

I'd venture that at that scale you don't really have much of an option except going active. Passive is essentially swimming with the stream, but what if you're big enough to affect the stream...you're kinda active in a way already right there.

Eh, the money is going in and eventually coming out over lengthy timescales. If active management means dipping into a smaller number of tradable assets, then the effect would only be worse. If they have to split it between a large number of active managers with different strategies because their fund is too big, then they might be de facto indexing the broader market while paying over the odds for it.

For assets traded on an exchange at least (e.g., not directly-invested real estate), it's more of a logistical problem than anything else: how do you track indices that you want to track by dripping money into and out of the market, both trying not to affect supply/demand too much, but while not deviating from the index too much. It's the same problem that a BlackRock or Vanguard face but at slightly smaller (!) scale, and one more for computer programmers with knowledge of market microstructure than people that demand outsize bonuses who think they have "alpha" and get lucky (or not).

Yeah but I'd pick stocks for them for a thousandth of that.

That's why you're not picking stocks for them ;)

If he picked randomly, it's entirely possible that he could do a better job :)

If this fund's actual purchases are available, this is a thing you can check.

Would make for a good headline, too. "$60 Million for a coin flip!"

The difference between $60k and $60M, for a fund nearly a trillion dollars large, is worth it if that person worth $60M can eek out even a few extra basis points in returns. Despite what many people believe, there are those out there who have an eye for value, and _can_ pick stocks.

> there are those out there who have an eye for value, and _can_ pick stocks.

There's simply no evidence that is true at all. Every study of this issue says the exact opposite: there's no one out there who can pick stocks.

Actually, I think the studies generally show that active mutual funds do beat the market, but before fees. Their alpha, while real, is tiny and more than eaten by their fees.

Yet remember that active mutual funds manager fees are close to 1%. If you pay $60M on $900B, we're talking about paying less than 1 bp! So if you have an average active mutual fund manager running your $900B fund for $60M, you might hope to beat the market by a few basis points.

What you also have to appreciate is that the fee scales you mention are for you investing $10,000 with an active manager. If you're investing billions you won't be paying anything close to that. If you have the world's largest sovereign wealth fund you're operating at a scale even larger than that.

In general I've always agreed with this view. But I can't help but wonder how studies like this explain Berkshire Berkshire Hathaway.

Which is funny because BH have literally the opposite bet: http://longbets.org/362/

It seems a bit contradictory, but BH is a holding company versus a hedge fund.

It's not that contradictory. As long as the market for stock pickers overcharges, people can be good at it and a bad deal at the same time.

Right but if you follow the theory if you had alpha greater than fees then you could essentially control all funds available for management (up to the scale where your atrategies stop working). Which is sort of its own reductio ab absurdum.

Berkshire seems to be good at buying and managing companies in order to make money. But not so good at just buying stock:

http://fortune.com/2016/04/29/berkshire-hathaway-stock-warre...

Not sure if this is what you're asking, but if fund returns are random but different, then someone is going to have the best performing fund.

Let's say the best performing fund is (fictional) Xanadu Investments we'd ask, how do we explain Xanadu's performance.

Berkshire Hathaway did well to begin with, but Warren Buffet is able to get really good deals buying companies because he has a reputation as a good manager. Since he is easy to work with, founders sell cheaper.

>Since he is easy to work with, founders sell cheaper.

This requires a source. Many of the companies he purchases are public companies. If they are selling "cheaper" because they like Mr. Buffet, there's a problem.

The important Berkshire acquisitions are entire companies, most of the time private. Sometimes they were public at one point but were taken private before BRK bought them. (ex: Duracell). Sometimes they were public at the point Berkshire bought them (ex: BNSF) but this seems to be the exception.[1]

The public stock acquisitions that they talk about on the 13-F are really a minority of Berkshire's activity, but sometimes he really does get a better price because he's willing and able to negotiate weird deals like the Bank of America warrants.

That's actually not true. A study came out in March of this year that describes a simple screen: low fees + high manager ownership of the fund. Active funds passing the screen beat the S&P 500 55% of the time and have a higher average return over a 20 year time period.

That said, you have to hold for a long time to see that edge. If you don't the odds go negative again.

http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20160318/FREE/16031992...

There are people who beat the market all the time. If that is what you're referring to.

> is worth it if that person worth $60M can eek out even a few extra basis points in returns

[...] and no one else could/would have performed better for less than $60M.

That's not the point. The way compensation works, usually, is that you say, "if you do well, we'll pay you this much", where "this much" depends on how well the person does. You can't change your mind post-fact, "well, anyone could have done this well, so we won't actually pay you this much".

I don't doubt that they were contractually bound to pay the 60M$.

The parent comment sort of implied that the fund couldn't possibly have overpaid, because 60M$ is such a small fraction of profits. All I'm saying is that they might have overpaid, at the time of signing the contract, if another equally skilled manager would have taken the job for a smaller compensation package.

The funny thing is that in this case they actually somehow managed to pay him half of what he was entitled to according to their agreement.

They are still only 1% of global stocks - hardly 'big enough to affect the stream'

It's nearly a trillion dollars. Yes, a trillion dollars is market-making. If it all moved at once world economies would shit themselves for a time.

Even beyond that, there are only about 200 sovereign states in the world. I'd say a country like Norway, with fewer citizens than the state of Washington, controlling 1% of global anything is noteworthy and undeserving of scoff.

Anecdotally; I spoke to a person from "Norges Bank Investment Management" today at a careers fair about this issue, and apparently this example of using active external investors is something that they have been avoiding since, and that the magnitudes of their internal bonuses are far more restrictive.

This is a very good point. A very simple scenario would be that all the money is placed in super-thrifty ETFs with .05% fees. When you have figures as high as $882B, those outside management fees get large. In this case, it would be 441M!

If you're successfully managing nearly a trillion dollars, that's a bargain. There are CEO's who run billion dollar companies into the ground and receive more compensation than that!

The manager who received $60MM was managing assets worth $325MM.

The fund has also started to become active in pushing for lower executive pay...

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36185925

But how large returns was he generating? You seem to feel strongly against asset managers being compensated well.. but IF he was delivering great returns, I don't really see the problem?

That said, $60MM per year for $325MM AuM does seem a lot.

It's because financial transparency doesn't have allot of competition, it's a low bar to say and do some transparent things

Anyway, that manager needs to negotiate a better deal if they only get 60m annually with almost a trillion AUM

$60m isn't exactly the real cost to the government, though? Assuming this asset manager is a Norwegian resident, he'll pay a ton of tax (income or corporate tax, VAT, stamp duty on property purchases, capital gains, etc etc) on that money, and eventually given enough time, most will just flow back to the government. The house always wins..

Also, it depends on how much he brings in. For example, there are US based asset managers with private funds that generate 20-30-40% per annum, for over 20 years. If the performance is there, they should get compensated well for that. Otherwise, why put up with the stress of managing billions of dollars?

> 20-30-40% per annum, for over 20 years

It is impossible, at least continuously. Nobody has ever managed to do that. You'd be lucky if you could beat the market by a few points on average over a 20 years time period. Compensation well for good performance does not make sense when you aren't penalized for losses.

That's just not true.

Joel Greenblatt's fund beat an annualized return of 40% from 1985 to 2006.

Carl Icahn got over a 30% per year annualized return from 1968 to 2011. That's almost 50 years!

Right, and a lottery winner who wins a $500MM jackpot on a $1 ticket has annualized return of even more than that, when annualized over the same timescale.

None of that matters if you can't pick the winning players in advance. With enough variance and enough players, someone will eventually have double-digit annualized returns over decades, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily superb investors.

The BIG difference is someone can go invest in Greenblatt or Icahn's fund with a reasonable expectation of these returns ongoing. Not so with a lottery winner.

Joel Greenblatt's new funds that he set up since returning in 2009 haven't done well, they have performed below the S&P 500 Index from 2009-2015:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/07/31/value-gur...

What would you think if you saw someone win the lottery 2 months out of every 3 for 20 years?

Buffett has actually picked the winners in advance in his great essay:

http://gdsinvestments.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Sup...

That said, a fund this size should be taking as passive of an approach as possible.

How would your position be falsified? You could always say that later someone will revert to the mean.

Simple, compare a large number of investors based on some criteria with the overall average.

AKA, if you think there are people that do better than average, then picking people who have beaten the odds for 10 years and see how they do over the next 10 years. Repeat over a few decades.

There are things that seem to work. The most common way to 'beat the market' is trading a low chance and ideally hidden chance of failure for inflated returns. EX: A 1 percent change of losing 95% of your investment should be worth lot's of money on good years. This is really appealing when investing other peoples money as you don't share in their downside.

Joel Greenblatt's new funds that he set up since returning in 2009 haven't done well, they have performed below the S&P 500 Index from 2009-2015:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/07/31/value-gur...

>Carl Icahn got over a 30% per year annualized return from 1968 to 2011. That's almost 50 years!

Citation? This would turn a $10,000 initial investment into $13BB. I have a hard time believing that.

>> "...impossible..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

"...famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning more than 35 percent annualized over a 20-year span..."

People have done it before. It has always turned out to be luck. Fantastic track record until they cease being lucky.

So, cynicism and economic orthodoxy aside, that sounds like a really cool company. Has anyone tried just tossing a big dumb neural network on stock data and investigated whether it can make money? It sounds very obvious, but a quick googling returns little. But I guess the investment industry is pretty secretive by nature.

> Has anyone tried just tossing a big dumb neural network on stock data and investigated whether it can make money?

... yes.

One of our Solutions Architects wrote this up for amusement: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/TensorFlow-mach...

You've no idea what you're talking about.

Renaissance technology is a quantitative trading company, meaning they use computers to trade; they probably do thousands of trades per day, and consistently make a profit. There's approximately 0% chance that it's just luck.

Now, you might say, they were lucky to stumble upon a strategy that works. You can also say that the strategy will stop working at some point (because of competition), so their "luck" will run out, and they might not get "lucky" in time to find a new strategy. But their past performance was most definitely not just "luck".

Btw, in most other professions (e.g. the arts, technical inventions, sports) we call this kind of "luck", "skill".

RenTec makes too many bets for their track record to be just luck.

Are you seriously asking if hedge funds that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars salary to top experts from all kinds of fields have investigated using machine learning?

Obviously someone has, but I want to know the results.

You can't just "toss a NN to stock market data" and expect good results. There's too little historical data, you can't easily "generate" more data for the network to learn from, making it really easy to overfit. In other fields (e.g. computer vision) a lot of research has been focused on inventing techniques that prevent overfitting, thus enabling "learning" (i.e. generalization of patterns), such as dropout, convolutional neural networks, flipping/rotating images, etc. Very few of these techniques can be applied generally.

Dropout can certainly be applied generally - it's useful as a regularization technique (especially in wide and deep networks) to combat overfitting in other fields than computer vision.

CNNs can be used in other fields as well.

It turns out to be rather difficult, because in most setups you see in the stock market, the market goes up roughly half the time, and down roughly half the time.

https://xkcd.com/1570/

There are millions of investors. The chances of a few outliers getting a long streak of returns are pretty good, even if they picked stocks at random. It's impossible to tell in advance who those lucky parties will be. But their existence is very likely.

Which is still less than someone who bought dell stock at IPO and held for 9 years.

So?

Dell's market cap at IPO was $80M.

You can't just pick one good company to invest in. What would these funds do with the other, oh, $10Bn they need to invest?

These funds are not getting that kind of returns on 10B. Often you see "fund not seeking additional investment."

That's my point. When you have so much money to invest you (are forced to) capture a more representative slice of the market and regress closer to the mean.

And they used algorithms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0

Continuously? Ok, perhaps that would be almost impossible, to pull off 20% for 20 years without missing a year.

However, Buffett and Soros managed to average above 20% annual returns over 30 plus years.

For example in the 1960s Berkshire returned 28.3% per year averaged. In the 1970s it returned 22.2% per year averaged. In the 1980s it averaged 39.1% (!) per year. In the 1990s it averaged 20.5% per year.

Nobody would hold their breath on another investor matching Buffett or Soros. It is in fact possible though. The big problem for the Norway fund is obviously the scale. Berkshire at $360b in market cap, will struggle perpetually going forward with keeping up with the S&P 500 over time (as is frequently noted by Buffett).

The thing about both Buffett and Soros is that they get deals that the general investor, or even really good and kinda famous investor, would never get. For example, Buffet did 300 million in unsecured loans (but with front-of-line payback) with Harley Davidson in 2009 at 15 percent, essentially to cover customer financing (i.e. cashflow) not because the company was in any real trouble. You and I would be lucky to find that sort of return from the riskiest loan, let alone a profitable manufacturing company. AND, Buffet could have made more than a Billion extra if he'd bought stock instead of debt, so even when he's wrong he's still getting a sweetheart deal.

It's important to note that this discussion is about a massive sovereign wealth fund, not the average investor.

I absolutely agree that the average person should stick to passive index funds. But if you have nearly a trillion dollars to invest, you'd be a fool to stick to passive strategies.

"From 1994 through mid-2014 it averaged a 71.8% annual return."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies

Yeah, the oil fund averages just 0.25% above index, and that's without the extra cost of being actively managed factored in (although its huge size probably makes it impossible for it to be passively managed).

Are you aware how much 0.25% of $800 billion dollars is? Now, go ahead and complain about a $60M compensation.

So at this stage factoring in the active management cost they are outperforming the market. Of course we don't know in the long run whether that will continue to be the case.

It's hard to beat the market when you're bigger than many markets.

The asset manager in question, Mattias Westman, wasn't Norwegian.

> there are US based asset managers with private funds that generate 20-30-40% per annum, for over 20 years.

That seems extremely dubious. Do you have any sources?

It's not controversial that there are funds with high returns over long periods. The problem is that there are also funds with high returns that suddenly nosedive, and new funds from people with high returns in the past that doesn't do well at all.

In other words: it's easy to pick the lottery numbers with hindsight.

... and the inhabitants always lose

For example, there are US based asset managers with private funds that generate 20-30-40% per annum, for over 20 years.

Pure Horseshit. Plain and simple.

Or, in other words: "Pics. Or it didn't happen."

I dont have pics, but insight. Typically these are funds exclusively for high net worth individuals. They are not advertised. They select who they let in and have limited pools of investment given they invest in areas/business that dont scale to trillion dollar levels type thing. They get to invest in business etc before the open market via their relationships which is I assume why they can get these returns. My source is a friend who is a partner in one of these funds. They average well over 20% return before fees. Typically they want people with $50m investable before your worth the conversation. And the sad thing for people like us is they are typically asked to preserve wealth (aka make sure I'm never poor) and and growth is secondary consideration.

So, by its very nature, investing based on access to privileged opportunities. Who's to say it is not based on leveraging privileged information too? In other words, a type of insider trading. Or market pre-loading.

Guess public sentiment hasn't caught up to such practices, yet, so they can get away with it.

What is the failure rate for such private funds? Obviously, we may never hear of their failures, just as we don't hear of their successes.

> investing based on access to privileged opportunities

I feel you really taking a bias stance here without understanding the mechanics. Yes privilege exists, the same as you friend might tell you a job is opening before its open knowledge. But deals will be shopped about. The big difference is many deals cant reasonably go to the public market. Costs for listing regulations would be significant and unnecessary. Consider, you need to be called as a 'sophisticated' investor even to trade options. This is to protect the public from unscrupulous pyramid schemes and business that carries high knowledge levels to understand what your buying into. It's as much about protecting the public keeping some deals away from open markets as being 'privileged'.

> Obviously, we may never hear of their failures If your around this industry you hear plenty of both sides. Bigger ones go to public news like Madoff.

Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Michael Steinhardt, and arguably George Soros.

And those are just the popular ones that I know of, as a passive investor.

A little over decade ago, when Norway's fund was called "the Petroleum Fund" and had "only" $147B, an article in Slate magazine explained what was special about it:

"Norway has pursued a classically Scandinavian solution. It has viewed oil revenues as a temporary, collectively owned windfall that, instead of spurring consumption today, can be used to insulate the country from the storms of the global economy and provide a thick, goose-down cushion for the distant day when the oil wells run dry."[1]

Since then, the fund has grown six-fold.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2004/10/avoi...

It's kind of funny that the classically Scandinavian solution was mostly the work of an Iraqi geologist http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-public-god-foru...

I think similar ideas are found all over the world, but few countries outside of Northern Europe have the necessary political responsibility and lack of corruption to actually execute successfully on these ideas.

In Ireland we had a sovereign wealth fund for pensions, called the National Pensions Reserve Fund.

The government raided it to pay for budget shortfalls caused by offering a blanket, virtually unconditional guarantee to (private sector) bank debts, even unsecured bank debts, caused by the collapse in the Irish property market in 2008. The insane loans issued were made whole by the taxpayer at enormous cost to the wider economy. Of course, very little of those involved actually went to prison, although some higher ups in Anglo Irish (described as the worst bank in the world, even worse than Icelandic banks) were eventually, after many years, sent to prison [2]. The CEO of Anglo was even acquitted by a jury!

"The NPRF’s asset base had increased to over €22 billion in 2009. However, following the economic and banking collapse, its assets have been diverted as successive governments raided it to fund programmes or help meet the State’s fiscal commitments during the crisis."

This is a long way of saying that even in Northern Europe incompetence and fraud is possible. I wish we had the competence and level of societal trust the Norwegians have.

[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/national-pension-res...

[2] http://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/anglo-...

The Norwegians also had a very sensible approach to their banking crisis compared to the US and Ireland:

>There are five features of the Norwegian resolution I would like to highlight:

>Private solutions were explored before the government intervened.

>Share capital was written down to zero before committing public funds.

>The government acted swiftly to limit contagion, but did not provide a blanket guarantee. Liquidity support was given to illiquid, but solvent institutions.

>The government did not use an asset management company - as the other Nordic countries did later on.

The "Share capital was written down to zero before committing public funds." seems smart. At least if you wipe out the shareholders it's an incentive to behave better the next time.

I (sincerely) wonder - what would happen if USA were to receive such a short-duration windfall? Will it be socked away in a rainy day fund, or will it be spent immediately in terms of infrastructure programs, or welfare programs or tax cuts/rebates?

In fact, California experienced such a windfall due to rising stock prices in recent years, and Jerry Brown had to fight with the legislature to save that in a rainy day fund instead of spending on welfare programs.

See e.g.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

The fund pays a yearly dividend to permanent residents.

The article also mentions that one of the reasons for setting up the fund was dismay with how the initial $900 mill. of oil income was spent.

Now research the current state of the fund, there is a bit of controversy going on right now. The governor has unilaterally limited the payout this year and a lot of folks aren't happy.

As a Canadian I feel so cheated learning about Norway's Oil Fund.

Our government hasn't hardly saved a dime of our Oil Income.

We have been taking a small cut of the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil we have been producing daily for the past 100+ years and spending it as fast as we possibly can.

>Most of the oil companies exploring for oil in Alberta were of U.S. origin, and at its peak in 1973, over 78 per cent of Canadian oil and gas production was under foreign ownership and over 90 per cent of oil and gas production companies were under foreign control, mostly American. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_production_in_Canada...

We have been taking a small cut of the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil we have been producing daily for the past 100+ years and spending it as fast as we possibly can.

Right, but the money was spent on something tho'. So the question - and I don't know the answer - is whether having that thing, at the time, was worth more than having something else, in the future.

It just seems like if we had of kept the money and re-invested it... like Norway did... that we would have been much better off in the long run.

We could ask the same question in the UK. Successive governments believed in using the money to lower taxes instead. Whether that was right or wrong no-one can really say - but consider that around the time the North Sea came online, income tax was as high as 83% and tax on income from investments was 98%.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2008/04/why-hasnt-britain-got-a-s...

882 B / 5.2 Million ~= $170k for every citizen of Norway.

At 4% a year that's $6,800 each in annual income. Not bad!

Not bad, but not enough to cover the current levels of household debt in Norway, while a large portion of the debt is tied to mortgages the mortgage debt in the Norway have been increasing faster than income for quite a few years now. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/norway/households-debt-to-gd...

This isn't a problem unique to Norway, Norway is just one of the biggest offenders, even in the Nordic countries there is a trend of creating a new generation or class of indentured citizens.

Many EU countries need to look at germany and start reducing housing prices, one of the main contributors to Germany's low household debt is a 10 year cap on mortgages.

Countries like Sweden and Norway just now starting to cap it, Sweden capped the mortgage term to 105 years (no this isn't a typo) this year and the current average mortgage term in Sweden is still over 140 years, and Norway isn't much better off (It was slightly higher than Sweden IIRC I just can't find a source atm).

While the Nordic countries take pride in their model the current economics are pretty bad under the surface, you have a combination of inflated housing prices, extreme housing shortages, and mortgages that can span over 3 generations.

To some extent the Nordic model isn't a choice it's an outcome of the economic policy to the point where a lot of people that appear to be wealthy are actually in dire debt and dependant on the state.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/mortgages/sweden...

> one of the main contributors to Germany's low household debt is a 10 year cap on mortgages.

Where did you get the idea of that cap?

10-year mortgages were the common case, but there's no actual cap. (See here for current mortgage interest rates up to 30 years: https://www.baufi24.de/tagesaktuelle-hypothekenzinsen/)

When you say "140 year mortgage term", what exactly are you talking about? Effective term or something? Because the banks only offer a choice between 20, 25 and 30 year mortgage terms usually.

(a) in the 1990's, many banks did offer 50 year terms.

(b) sweden has a lot of interest-only mortgages. If you look at the rate they are being repaid, it represents a repayment period of 148 years.[1]

[1] http://www.fi.se/upload/43_Utredningar/20_Rapporter/2013/bol...

Norway's been tightening the mortgage belt for years now. You can only borrow less than 85% of the purchase price of the house, excluding fees. That was set in 2012 IIRC. And now (from January 2017) there will be a complete ban on interest-only mortgages (even just for limited time periods), and a hard cap at total loan amount (including also student/car loan etc.) for each family not exceeding 5x total gross income.

Source: am planning to buy a new house, had a meeting with my bank man two weeks ago.

Overall the time you are allocated to clear the debt, the 30 years is the "nominal" max term offered, it can be extended.

I'm not certain about some of those mortgages: From everything I've learned since I've been in Norway, after the whole financial crisis they took steps to minimize some of the housing stuff.

Housing is expensive where I'm at: It is much cheaper outside of the city. There is debt tied to the house, if you own a house.

The average mortgage is 20-30 years - what you are stating isn't the average. This isn't actually all that much outside of the rates in the US, and part of the reason is to keep housing affordable for people. What is different is that people tend to stay at a job for a much longer time frame.

In addition, housing comes with a required down payment, depending on your age. I think for folks under 23, they have to have 10% down payment: Everyone else should have 20% (or possibly 25%), capped at something like 3.5 times income.

As far as debt goes, you can't really inherit debt here. You can inherit a bit of debt through inheritance - ie, tax on a house that had value. The other way to have that is for parents to co-sign on a loan, but that isn't the same sort of thing. There are some laws to prevent children inheriting debt from what I understand.

It's what inevitably happens when the balance between "owner-occupied housing as investment" and "housing as cost of living" gets out of whack.

"Sweden capped the mortgage term to 105 years"

Do you have any other citations for this? I have never heard about this in the Swedish news and I'm quite curious where The Telegraph got that information from.

Swedish financial authority:

http://www.fi.se/upload/43_Utredningar/20_Rapporter/2013/bol...

There are also reports from various global banks and financial organizations, google is your friend.

Will that be the reason why Germany has one of the lowest home ownership rates?

Not the only reason, and most likely not the primary one. When adjusted for age Germany has a pretty solid house ownership rate.

Germany is big and has a pretty mobile workforce, in many other countries you are considerably less likely to be moving every 2-5 years across large distances like you are in Germany.

Overall the affordability of housing even when accounting for mortgages and required seed money is considerably better in Germany than in Norway, Sweden or Denmark, and while Germany does have about half the house ownership rate on paper it is also because rent is both available and affordable and is favored by the younger workforce.

One can argue about what is better having to rent until you settle down at the age of 30-35, or buying a house at the age of 19 with decades of mortgage and only having to sell it to move into your parent's house which is still under mortgage. The house pricing in Oslo rivals NYC these days.

Also while Germany does have a considerable below average age for the EU28, the highest / above average EU28 countries are not those which you would expect, those are the Eastern European countries like Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia etc. countries which were in the USSR/Warsaw Pact or were under socialism at one point or another. When you give everyone in the country a home at some point in time you'll end up having very high homeownership rates even 50 years later.

Thank you for explaining in detail. It's very interesting.

On the other hand, Nordics are not exactly clones of each other. I believe the mortgage terms are less crazy in Denmark and Finland.

The US would need 56 trillion to achieve the same level of per capita income

That's not a correct calculation, however the US has sovereign wealth funds which are usually administered on a state level and are usually orietned towards a specific funding goal (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_School_Fund) , as well as social security. The Social Security Trust Fund is a sovereign wealth fund it's not called like that due to historic convention, but it does operate like one.

Overall a pretty stark difference between the funds is the source and volatility of the revenue, US funds tend to be considerably more safe in those regards, and the how and where it is invested. 55-60% of Norway's (and there are calls to increase this to 70%) fund is invested in the international stock markets, US funds are for the most part invested locally (within the US) and in considerably less volatile commodities.

A large scale financial crisis can erase much of Norway's SWF while having considerably less effect on US social security and state level SWF's.

>The Social Security Trust Fund is a sovereign wealth fund it's not called like that due to historic convention, but it does operate like one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the SS Trust Fund has to exclusively buy Treasury bonds, while other sovereign funds make investments in the public stock markets, etc. Seems an important difference.

Different sovereign/public funds have different regulations, they are usually split between equity and fixed income, Norway splits it to 60% equity, 5% real estate, and 25% fixed income. As far as the fixed income goes most of it is invested in treasury bonds, while the equity is invested in primarily the international stock markets.

Overall the Social Security Act does disallow prefunding of the fund with marketable investments but one of the reasons it hasn't been changed it's because it's actually a pretty solid policy, and the world for the most part also doesn't want the US to drop a 3 trillion dollars investment pinata on the global markets.

Overall while there is a lot of clickbait that inflates the Norwegian one it is not a special case if you look at public fund rankings http://www.swfinstitute.org/fund-rankings/ you'll see that the US Federal Pensions Fund and the California Reteirment Fund combined are about equal to the Norwegian National Fund, and those are just 2 funds.

Overall pretty much every state in the US has multiple SWFs, public funds or similar investment ventures those are usually directed at a specific funding target e.g. retirement, public schools, universities, infrastructure etc. Each fund funds usually only a single thing and each fund has a different source of revenue and investment goals and regulations, for the most part based on how the US federal system works in general it's a better model. California isn't expected to fund education in Texas or pay for a new road in Wyoming and vise versa so each state runs their own funds to fund their own needs (there is some federal money involved) overall it's likely a slightly safer bet than putting all your eggs in a single basket.

This is also why you simply can't blow up the Norway's fund to US levels and say you'll need 56 trillion dollars because the US doesn't pay for everything from a single fund.

The Gross National Wealth of Norway including the fund is about 85% of the US one when adjusted per capita, Norway is rich, the fund is wonderful and very well performing but it's not some unheard of economic miracle that no one else is using ;)

Actually the state funds do hold real assets but the federal system does not, there's no $3 trillion dollars to invest, the Social Security Trust Fund is just a non-marketable claim on the U.S. Treasury. It is an accounting placeholder-- a promise if you will-- there are no assets of any kind backing it. When the IOUs come due the Treasury will have to cut spending, raise taxes, or borrow new funds.

This isn't exactly the case, "real assets" is a tricky term. There is a difference between the SSA and the Social Security Fund, the SSA is funded through the budget "independently" of the fund, in some years the SSA have been funded at a deficit.

Yes you can say that the fund is an "accounting placeholder" just like many other economic tools, when you take a loan from a bank it doesn't give you money, it effectively gives you a tradeable IOU against yours even tho you treat it as currency.

To put in in a simpler terms the year to year budgetary deficit of the SSA against the payout claims should be treated as a separate thing to the actual Social Security Fund, if the US government or any other institution with sufficient means and credit would make a commitment to pour 3bln dollars into a bucket, said bucket is now worth 3bln dollars even if it is empty.

This (and your other comments in this thread) was super interesting to read. Thanks!

In fact you are wrong. The SS Trust Fund holds no real assets. It holds non-marketable IOUs from the Treasury. They do not invest in Treasurys, although the SS surplus is spent by the federal government. There are no actual assets and there is no real trust fund, it is just an accounting scheme. Treasury will need to raise taxes, cut spending, or borrow cash on the open market to repay the IOUs.

Trillion (10^12), not quadrillion.

Norway also has foreign debt of greater than $600B or 75% of the Global Fund.

Many countries have very large foreign debts and nothing similar to the Global Fund, so Norway is still doing far better off, relatively speaking.

> and nothing similar to the Global Fund

This is untrue, while a country might not have a single large SWF most of them have similar investments they are just distributed and managed differently. What you would be correct to say is that not many countries have a single large SWF which is primarily funded through the "nationalization" of the revenue from mineral rights.

Also please note that the "882B" are for both funds or if you like the Government Pension Fund of Norway Fund manages 2 discrete SWF's the petroleum revenue fund and the national insurance/tax revenue fund.

Didn't mean to infer otherwise. I agree Norway is doing quite well, but when you look at the credits and debits it puts things in a different perspective.

Interesting. Why do they choose to keep this money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of choosing to pay off their debt?

From a random webpage http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/debtclock/norway - "NOTE The Norwegian central government is in a net asset position, i.e. the government’s total financial assets exceed the total debt. They borrow cheap to then re invest."

The Norwegian 10Y treasury bond has a coupon rate of 1.3% (lower than the US T-Note! suffice to say, very cheap).

The wealth fund has been growing around 8% per year.

Borrow money at a rate of 1.3%, reinvest it and make 8%.

It's one of the golden rules of banking: if you can borrow money for cheap, do so.

The fund generated an annual return of 5.5 percent between 1 January 1998 and the end of the second quarter of 2016. After management costs and inflation, the annual return was 3.6 percent.

https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/return-on-the-fund/

But does that not include a sharp dive during 2 recessions in Europe?

Because the debt doesn't necessarily harm their economy, and the fund can be put to better use than huge lump sum payments of a debt that doesn't impact Norway.

Some debt is also a good thing for a country to operate - it's populace, especially their pension schemes, will want to buy government bonds.

Bonds and other Government debt tends to be very inexpensive to service. Unless a country's debt levels are extremely excessive, and assuming that it expects its economy to grow, then there isn't much reason to ever pay down debt, just keep servicing it through to maturity.

Remember that a country doesn't have to retire, so its debt is quite different than a household's.

Likely because their debt comes on better terms than their income from their fund. Or their debt is structured in such a way that they can't pay it off until some time in the future.

Because their return on investments in the fund should be higher than their debt interest.

Norway's oil money story is one of the weirdest. Are there any examples in history where a country has saved up such a big stash? Are they planning to retire young, as a nation?

I live in Calgary, Alberta which is pretty much the exact counterpoint to Norway with a very similar historical starting point (size, population, dynamics). It doesn't matter who's in power, all our governments spend like drunken sailors on shore-leave, no sales tax to even out the boom/bust (and counter low-ish taxes), A savings fund that is now empty going into an incredibly rough period.

I'm not says one is better than the other - Norway looks great right now, but didn't when I visited ~10 years ago and my Subway "value" meal cost over $25 CDN - just an interesting counterpoint.

I keep waiting for that manufacturing "bump" from Eastern Canada we were promised from a sinking dollar...

> I'm not says one is better than the other - Norway looks great right now, but didn't when I visited ~10 years ago and my Subway "value" meal cost over $25 CDN - just an interesting counterpoint.

Careful with such examples. Local prices are first of all adjusted for local wages, and second of all the NOK exchange rate is just nasty.

Alberta did spend most of the their oil money. Based on a Google search, it looks like the Heritage Trust Fund maxed out at ~$20B for a population of ~2.5M. So maybe 1/20th of what Norway has put away on a per capita basis?

Not sure if relevant, but in Oslo today a half-foot sub-of-the-day with no drinks runs you $5.50 canadian. A big mac with a menu is $14.50

> Are there any examples in history where a country has saved up such a big stash ? Are they planning to retire young, as a nation?

i think they want to avoid the resource curse/paradox of plenty by taking the oil money out of circulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Countries that rely on income from natural resources are worse off because they tend to neglect everything else that might generate wealth; also with these countries a small elite tends to get hold of the oil well, this leads to authoritarian rule and other goodies.

A windfall from oil often turns out to have many toxic side effects, so it was a very wise decision to stash it far away, as far as possible.

>Are they planning to retire young, as a nation?

What an amusing thought. One big problem is that, one part of the idea of retirement is that you eventually die. I hope Norwegians aren't planning doing that, as a nation...

Maybe the term we are looking after is "living on the interest", as old middle class ladies plan to do in the 19th century novels.

I think the idea is that why trade in oil or gas, forestry or fishing, when you can trade in money? The way the global economy works being that money is not a result of other industries but an industry, a commodity, in and of itself. Money has its own industry, so just produce that instead of oil. Could that not be the long term plan?

Is there an index or ETF which follows this pension fund's investments?

No. The up-to-date composition of the fund is not public nor should it be due to the very real possibility of moving the markets in unintended ways. However, they do publish annual reports of investments which you can access on their website. Here's a 2015 one: https://www.nbim.no/contentassets/70de238e3f6747228b76a99ec2...

Visiting Norway, I always thought it is kind of a weird country. On one hand it's one of the richest countries in the world. On the other hand, I've seen so many young Norwegian women work hard cleaning toilets and hotel rooms. Such jobs would be considered "low rung" at in the US but in Norway they treat their low rung jobs as something to be proud of.

Someone has to clean the toilets. You're expressing shock that Norway doesn't have a racial underclass like latinos or blacks in the US? Kind of a weird thing to comment on, Norway is a very homogenous country.

Did the OP edit the original comment? I don't see any mention of race and the OP is just stating he is impressed by how Norwegian women take pride in doing even the most menial of jobs (which is something I noted too when I was there).

Just found it strange how did you come to the conclusion of a "racial underclass" when there was no mention of it so i was wondering if it is an american thing.

Note: While not as multi-cultural as the US of course, Norway is not exclusively a "homogeneous" society and in fact, I just noted that almost 1/3 of my Norwegian friends are not "Nordic born". You obviously haven't been there if you made that conclusion yourself.

Who else would work those jobs if not Norwegians? It's implied if they didn't another group would do it.

There are people working as cleaners in Norway that earn about the same as the average software developer. (cleaning offshore on oil platforms[1]).

Norway has a very tight pay distribution. Most people earn close to the average/median, and those who earn more get hit pretty hard by progressive taxing.

[1]: http://www.dn.no/nyheter/energi/2010/08/30/her-tjener-renhol...

Two things are to be noted here: 1) Even "low rung" jobs pay a decent salary. That's the main reason why everything is so more expensive here even compared to Sweden. 2) Cleaning staff is probably the industry with the highest number of foreigners, either new refugees or EU-immigrants. So it depends on your definition of "Norwegian woman", i'd argue most of these workers were not born in Norway.

That may also be due to the egalitarian nature of Norway, the gap between the lowest and highest paid jobs are not that large. If you remove the statistical anomalies. So any job will allow you to live a similar life as your neighbors whom may have a more "perceived" glamorous job. There really isn't much of a working class nor upper class, just variations of a huge middle class.

Though I am not sure I share you opinion on who does the cleaning though. Maybe in a more rural hotel that is the case but whenever I go back to the Oslo especially more recently nearly all the "low rung" jobs are done by recent immigrants.

I noticed hotels seemed to be mostly eastern Europeans, offices a mix of Somali, Vietnamese etc and in restaurants mostly Swedes. There certainly was often discussions in the media of Norwegian youth being too spoilt for those jobs and the country depended on over qualified immigrants to fill these necessary roles. This may also be the case in many other countries.

A full time shift job with no overtime at a normal grocery store (40 hrs/week) should earn you about 350 000 - 400 000 nok, or usd 42-48k

Keep in mind the cost of living is high in Oslo.

I am not saying it needs to be young, Norwegian women, but who would you expect to see cleaning toilets?

So who cleans the toilets in the USA? Old american men?

Related to a lot of discussion comments, I highly recommend "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" by Burton Malkiel. https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/03933...

You can't beat http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold...

In the "Top of the World" graph in the article, there's a dip for Saudi Arabia. Does anyone know why?

That when SA started "attacking" Iran and Russia (the countries), and the US and Canadian oil industries (not the countries), by reducing oil prices.

They started drawing from their fund to continue paying for all the entitlements their citizens expect.

They calculate they can ride it out longer than the rest because of their fund. So far they are correct.

Saudi Arabia significantly cut the oil price (which caused the global dip), and is since making up the difference by withdrawing from the oil fund.

The long term goal here is not entirely clear, but it mostly seems like a way to hurt the Russian economy and the fracking industry.

>Saudi Arabia significantly cut the oil price (which caused the global dip)

Saudi Arabia can't cut the price of oil. They can increase or decrease their own (albeit large proportional) supply.

I see lots of comments talking about the return on investment (~4% YoY) and the ~$60M in bonuses, etc. But I don't see anyone questioning why there is so much money invested in other companies outside Norway.

I'm curious to know: 1) Why do we have a savings Fund with double of the annual GDP? Should we have a limit? Why the excess is not invested locally? 2) Is there an existing plan to define when the money will be directed to the Norway economy? The current GDP per capita is around $68K which doesn't seem that much compared to the amount of money in the country's saving account. Why not invest in education and/or technology? 3) Why there are a few people earning so much money (e.g. ~$60M bonus) to manage the country's assets? Is the real purpose to make money or save the money for future generations?

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