41–50 of 159 posts
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Norway also has foreign debt of greater than $600B or 75% of the Global Fund.
Interesting. Why do they choose to keep this money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of choosing to pay off their debt?
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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…
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.
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$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 ass…
> 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.
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!
"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…
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.
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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.
Yeah but I'd pick stocks for them for a thousandth of that.
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>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…
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…
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.
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 prov…
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>> "...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 prett…
... yes.
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> 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.
>> "...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..."