Norway is considering tapping its sovereign wealth fund to dramatically increase its support for Ukraine amid signs that US military backing is waning. Europe is in crisis mode after a bitter clash between Trump and Zelenskyy at the White House, and the Trump administration is reportedly considering cutting off all military supplies to Ukraine. Norway is sitting on €1.7 trillion in the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, including an estimated €109 billion in war-related profits from increased gas prices in 2022 and 2023. The Nordic country has so far spent €3.35 billion on support to Ukraine - an amount described on Thursday as “pathetic” and “reprehensible” by the editors of major Swedish and Danish newspapers, whose countries, according to the same data, have contributed €5.41 billion and €8.05 billion respectively. “Norway is one of the few countries that has large amounts of money readily available, and we must therefore multiply our support for Ukraine immediately,” Liberal Party leader Guri Melby said on Saturday.
Yes, the rule is up to 4% of annual proceeds can go into the national budget for covering spending. That rule, however, is arbitrary nonsense and only serves to limit the size and scale of investments on the budget.
The actual limiting factor is that the law states that the purpose of the fund is to save for the benefit of future generations. That’s something they will have to navigate. Personally I would like for there to be a mechanism that basically requires a ‘business case’ outlining how any proposed investment/spending will align with that stated aim of the fund. Making such a case here should be pretty straightforward, as allowing one of our neighbouring countries to militarily invade and conquer their neighbours wouldn’t be good for said ‘future generations’.
It sounds to me like 4% is what they’ve guesstimated as being the maximum safe amount that can still fulfill that sustainable spending goal. I might call that “arguable,” but I wouldn’t call it “arbitrary.”
It’s arbitrary. The reasoning is based around avoiding inflationary effects, but that’s based on a stupidly simplistic and wrong-headed idea of how inflation works.
Even with the current limit they can help Ukraine quite a lot without hurting their long term goal too much.
It is not that simple. While the country is rich and getting richer, it’s population is getting relatively poorer. Housing is at an all-time high (as it is in so many places in the so called developed world). More and more complain about food prices, especially fresh vegetables and for some reason, chocolate. The country is completely dependent on imports.
They restricted the budget allowed to communes, which not only stopped their planned investments, but had to cut several services such as school and culture programs, mostly in the less dense areas.
Add to that the relatively weak krone, and you get a very strong feeling of moving down. This pushes their local populist right wing party (FrP) high.
Many would not understand the remote support while they experience those cuts.
“Housing is at an all-time high”?
The reason chocolate is expensive is because the last couple of harvest were a horrifying preview of what global warming is gonna do. Cocoa, now coffee harvests are failing. My pessimistic side would say: eat chocolate now, while you can. Those prices are not coming back down in our lifetime.
“late 2023, failed cacao harvests have contributed to a major jump in cocoa prices on the New York and London markets where cocoa is traded, reported The Guardian.”
Oops.
Not negating the price hike, but for whatever reason I don’t see people from other countries complaining about chocolate so specifically. In France for example, housing, fuel and electricity are big topics, but chocolate is not.
Thing about social democratic bureaucracy is that it tends to end up being extremely rigid with politicians who are particularly entrenched in this rigid system of rules. So in these states, things like ‘not hurting long term goals too much’ matters because going at cross purposes with legally stated aims in any way is more than good enough reason to not do it at all. You don’t get to interpret your way around the law in states like Norway.
Add to this that the same politicians also have entirely forgotten what social democracy is supposed to be - maintaining a capitalistic market economy while leveraging state power to counteract its negative social effects and ensure the social security of the people - in favour of some idea that it’s actually just a set of basic institutions that were invented one to two hundred years ago that don’t need any kind of updating outside of just the bare minimum of maintenance, and… well, you end up with states that run relatively well but increasingly keep creaking at the seams, everything increasingly underfunded, with politicians who seem convinced they can’t actually do anything apart from tinkering at the edges.
This breeds discontent and political distrust. And in such conditions, it doesn’t really matter if the vast majority would want us to support good causes abroad, people will still be angry about it because it feels like they are getting stepped on in favour of someone else. They couldn’t tell you exactly why they feel that way, so they grab on to the nearest idea - cognitively speaking - that they can spin an understandable narrative about. Immigrants is the obvious one. Political elites playing their games the obvious next one. Then comes the common misunderstandings about economics, especially where inflation is relevant.
Basically our politicians have put themselves in a corner they are unequipped to get themselves out of, and everything they do ends up producing backlash one way or another.