[kwhitefoot]

I suspect that the people arguing here that Norway should direct that huge volume of money internally are not Norwegian residents. Those of us who live in Norway, most of us anyway, recognize that doing that would be a disaster and would just fund short term spending and fuel inflation.

The UK and the Dutch just spent the money they got from the North Sea oil and at least the UK has little to show for it.

Anyway, the Norwegian economy is doing just fine without it, we bounced back from COVID faster than practically everywhere else and everywhere I look there are new commercial and industrial buildings going up.

[marcosdumay]

There must be some way that a honest government can spend a lot of money improving a country.

The ideas that this decision can not be made in a hurry and that the spending can jump in size too quickly are reasonable. But the ones that there is absolutely nothing better to do with the money, and that most of it will be there in a large crisis when they need to withdraw are both ridiculous.

[vlovich123]

The larger your economy, the more of a financial cushion you should create and the longer your investment horizon needs to become. If you want to have a resilient society anyway. Political pressures though count against it and demagoguery can make it extremely appealing to reap short term benefits at the cost of long term investment in your own society.

It’s why I was really sad to see the Canadian government give up on its Crown corporations. Sure, they got tens of billions of dollars for it. But that wealth took a really long time to acquire in the first place and the market cap of having a complete monopoly can’t have been priced in correctly (otherwise the private market wouldn’t have been all lathered up at the opportunity to take over).