Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund's Investment Philosophy (youtube.com)
‘Why don’t we have a wealth fun? Other countries have a wealth fund.' Trump, and Biden agrees on this. A Sovereign wealth fund, a systematic government authority that makes broad investments inside or outside the US. This seemed ‘crazy’ to Larry Summers.
Norways (a country of 5m homogenous people), one of the top famous funds, is now worth $1.7t. ‘We have to navigate all the stakeholders, and that’s a very interesting exercise.' Most sovereign fund countries have lots of natural resources like oil, so they have so much export money, and they can't invest it in the country, so they put it to work internationally. China, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait have the biggest nominally funds. Now such funds invest in AI, datacenters, green infrastruture and renewables, as a focus, although they invest in all public traded companies.
Norways fund was set up in the 90s to fix a problem caused by their oil drilling successes which started in the 60s. They own 1.5% of stocks in the world's 9000 listed companies. They say this means they consider low crop yeilds, environmental harms, etc as economic sustainability risks which means they care about those things anywhere, basically. They have a separate board which denies the ability to invest in some other things for moral reasons, things like brown coal, weapons, tobacco. All their political parties agree on the big guidelines for the fund. ... They don't invest in private equity and credit because it's not in their mandate, because the public has not yet approved doing this (the fund managers want to).