Jens Stoltenberg: How Norway Built the World’s Largest Fund

Hi everyone, I'm Nikola Tanjan, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and today I'm really excited because I'm here with a guest who has defined the last 30 years of Norway's place in the world. So warm welcome to Jens Soldenberg. Thank you so much for having me. Now, um you created the fiscal rule uh that turned Norway's oil money into the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. You've been Prime Minister twice, you led NATO for 10 years, uh, and now you are back as finance minister running the fund you helped create.

Uh so very, very interesting. It is a fascinating history and of course there have been many decisions making this fund possible, but actually uh uh when I was uh when I became finance minister 30 years ago, In 1996, that was the year we made the first installment into the fund, and since then I've followed the fund very closely. Now, this week you compared Norway and Britain, two countries who basically produce the same amount of oil, right? Now, we got a big uh Sovent Wealth fund, Britain has uh quite a bit of debt.

What what happened here? How do how did we prioritize differently? It's als always very difficult uh uh to compare different countries, but uh but uh uh the fundamental uh message is that uh United Kingdom, they have produced more or less the same amount uh oil and gas as we have in Norway. In Norway we have a sovereign wealth fund of uh more than two uh two trillion US dollars. uh in in UK there is no sovereign wealth fund uh and of course there are many differences.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (28 minutes, 4,848 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.