Norway’s $1 Trillion Fund Wants Out of Oil and Gas Stocks November 16, 2017 by Bloomberg
SNIPPET:
By Sveinung Sleire (Bloomberg) — The $1 trillion fund that Norway has amassed pumping oil and gas over two decades wants out of energy stocks.
Norway, which relies on oil and gas for a fifth of economic output, would be less vulnerable to declining crude prices without investments in the industry, the central bank said Thursday. The divestment would mark the second major step in scrubbing the world’s biggest wealth fund of climate risk, after it sold most of its coal stocks.
“Our perspective here is to spread the risks for the state’s wealth,” Egil Matsen, the deputy central banker overseeing the fund, said in an interview in Oslo. “We can do that better by not adding oil-price risk.”
The plan would entail the fund, which controls about 1.5 percent of global stocks,
dumping as much as $40 billion of shares in international giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. The Finance Ministry said it will study the proposal and decide what to do in “fall of 2018” at the earliest.
Full article:http://gcaptain.com/norways-1-trillion-fund-wants-oil-gas-stocks/