This pension fund is now worth $1,000,000,000,000

[Dr. Who]

Norway's giant pension fund is now worth over $1 trillion. Yes, 1 followed by 12 zeros.

The fund's managers announced Tuesday that currency shifts had helped push its value above $1 trillion for the first time.
"The growth in the fund's market value has been stunning," fund chief Yngve Slyngstad said in a statement. "I don't think anyone expected the fund to ever reach $1 trillion when the first transfer of oil revenue was made in May 1996."
For comparison: $1 trillion is roughly the size of Mexico's economy.
Norway is a major oil producer, and it has plowed its energy earnings into the fund in order to fund pensions and other government expenses.
The fund is among the world's biggest investors in stocks, owning $667 billion worth of shares in over 9,000 companies globally. It owns on average 1.3% of all listed companies worldwide.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/19/investing/norway-pension-fund-trillion-dollars/index.html

Well, I guess retired Norwegians won't be eating cat food.

[Dr. Who]

As a little background:
The Government Pension Fund Global (Norwegian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language): Statens pensjonsfond Utland, SPU) is a fund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_fund) into which the surplus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus) wealth produced by Norwegian petroleum income is deposited. Its name changed in January 2006 from the Petroleum Fund of Norway. The fund is commonly referred to as the Oil Fund (Norwegian: Oljefondet).
The purpose of the fund is to invest parts of the large surplus generated by the Norwegian petroleum sector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry), mainly from taxes of companies but also payment for licenses to explore for oil as well as the State's Direct Financial Interest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State%27s_Direct_Financial_Interest) and dividends from the partly state-owned Statoil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statoil). Current revenue from the petroleum sector is estimated to be at its peak period and to decline in the future decades. The Petroleum Fund was established in 1990 after a decision by the country's legislature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storting) to counter the effects of the forthcoming decline in income and to smooth out the disruptive effects of highly fluctuating oil prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway.

Now, this is a government that puts its citizens first and thinks ahead.

[Cthulhu]

Have faith, the third world Invaders will run it into the ground.

Sent from my evil cell phone.

[DGUtley]

I dated a Norwegian in law school. Nice girl. There were 5 or 6 Norwegians attending John Carroll when I was at CWRU. She said that her father paid 76% in income tax. She talked about free this and free that. I reminded her that 76% wasn't exactly free.

[gamewell45]

I dated a Norwegian in law school. Nice girl. There were 5 or 6 Norwegians attending John Carroll when I was at CWRU. She said that her father paid 76% in income tax. She talked about free this and free that. I reminded her that 76% wasn't exactly free.

True, but I suspect they most likely get more for their money.

[Peter1469]

True, but I suspect they most likely get more for their money.


The government decides what they get, and they are left with less to get what they might want.

It is a trade off.

[jimmyz]

Our Social Security fund has many more trillions than those silly Norwegians... oh wait.