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by pyrolistical 54 days ago
A sovereign wealth fund makes sense if fund with profits from exploiting our natural resources.

That is how Norway did it

2 comments

And Norway has north of 2 trillion in that fund for about 5M people...

Like, well done. Impressive financial planning at that scale

Yep. Long term greedy nation taught by the best at Goldman Sachs. Thank you guys!
Yeah, why doesn't Norway spend the oil money on soccer teams and golden airplanes like a respectable and proper oil nation, instead of squandering it on reprobate socialist pension funds? Those lefse-eaters will just waste it on EV's and sensible woolen sweaters.
Don't worry you're not missing out. The country is infatuated with the idea of destroying the entrepreneurial and business running class which creates tax income and jobs. And also the middle class is being eviscerated by inflation and insane levels of government costs and taxes.[0]

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKn1FrthKwU

It's so bad, they're ranked 7th happiest country in the world...
Yeah and it isnt true
Sounds terrible. I bet the poor businessmen are moving in droves to more pro-market places like Argentina and Paraguay, right?
Nope. To Switzerland, Sweden and wherever else with saner taxation policies.
Norway extracts 1/2 oil as Canada but has 1/8 the population. Canada too big to be petro state. Canada has lots of other resource endowments, but not enough to sustain norway tier of per capita sovereign fund returns even if it massively increased extraction game. Only hope for Canada is US being really friendly, or even more friendly and force Canada to retool internal trade / reduce braindrain and build and capture more value in commodities and other sectors.
Norway's oil is also sweet and light, whereas Canadian oil is sour and heavy. The former is more valuable than the latter, from what I gather.
~30% price difference, but the main point is Canada cannot pump enough to make up per capita difference even if equivalent. Canada has too much people and too few petro endowments to be a petro state, wood/minerals/agri simply doesn't pay as well as energy