Norway Spends Reserve on Citizens. FAP Traitors Keep it For Themselves?

[makapaaa]

[h=1]All Norwegians become crown millionaires, in oil saving landmark[/h]By Alister Doyle
OSLO Wed Jan 8, 2014 12:25pm EST

4 Comments

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Siv Jensen, leader of Norway's Fremskrittspartiet (Progress party), speaks to party members while waiting for the result of the general elections in Oslo, September 9, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Gorm Kallestad/NTB Scanpix





















OSLO (Reuters) - Everyone in Norway became a theoretical crown millionaire on Wednesday in a milestone for the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund that has ballooned thanks to high oil and gas prices.
Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world's stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston, making the Nordic nation an exception when others are struggling under a mountain of debts.
A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion crowns ($828.66 billion), fractionally more than a million times Norway's most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300.

It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million crowns each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said.

Not that Norwegians will be able to access or spend the money, squirreled away for a rainy day for them and future generations. Norway has resisted the temptation to splurge all the windfall since striking oil in the North Sea in 1969.

Finance Minister Siv Jensen told Reuters the fund, called the Government Pension Fund Global, had helped iron out big, unpredictable swings in oil and gas prices. Norway is the world's number seven oil exporter.

"Many countries have found that temporary large revenues from natural resource exploitation produce relatively short-lived booms that are followed by difficult adjustments," she said in an email.

The fund, equivalent to 183 percent of 2013 gross domestic product, is expected to peak at 220 percent around 2030.

"The fund is a success in the sense that parliament has managed to put aside money for the future. There are many examples of countries that have mot managed that," said Oeystein Doerum, chief economist at DNB Markets.
Norway has sought to avoid the boom and bust cycle by investing the cash abroad, rather than at home. Governments can spend 4 percent of the fund in Norway each year, slightly more than the annual return on investment.
Still, in Norway, oil wealth may have made the state reluctant to make reforms or cut subsidies unthinkable elsewhere. Farm subsidies allow farmers, for instance, to keep dairy cows in heated barns in the Arctic.
It may also have made some Norwegians reluctant to work. "One in five people of working age receives some kind of social insurance instead of working," Doerum said, despite an official unemployment rate of 3.3 percent.
(Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Alison Williams)

 

[escher]

In Stinkapore, smear of shit on sole of shoe LKY gotten 700??? ++ FUCKING BILLIONS into the stinkapore sovereign funds

ALL THAT MONEY RAPED AND TIEW FROM SINKIES BY THE PAP MAGGOTS COCKROACHES CIVIL SERPENTS WORKING ON BEHALF OF LKY FOR THE MILLIONS THEY WERE GIVEN




THAT BILLIONS LKY STOLEN WILL ENSURE THE DEATH OF AH LOONIE AND LEE KWA FAMILIES WHEN LKY DIE AS PAP MAGGOTS COCKROACHES ARE ALL SHARPENING KNIVES TO HOOT AND HOOT TO GET AT THOSE BILLIONS

WHAT ARE MILLIONS WHEN YOU CAN GET BILLIONS?

HOOT HOOOT HOOOOOOOOT HHOOOOOT AH

 

[Leongsam]

It may also have made some Norwegians reluctant to work. "One in five people of working age receives some kind of social insurance instead of working," Doerum said, despite an official unemployment rate of 3.3 percent.

The most revealing paragraph of all. When people can get something for nothing, society will be destroyed in no time at all.

If Singapore went down the same route, the country would be flooded with lazy, useless scum in no time at all. Why would anyone want to strive for excellence if they could just sit back and receive free money?

 

[Asterix]

Dey Sinkie Gahbrament is expert at scaremongering
Maybe Johnny the Hongkie took lessons from them
Except that he forgot there's freedom of the press
Unlike in Sinkieland so maybe the Opposition interns
Should go through the Sinkie figures and enlighten us

It's more a scaremongering act than a poor job of forecasting
Howard Winn for South China Morning Post, 11th January 2014

In the previous financial year, Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah forecast a budget surplus of HK$3.5 billion and we ended up with a surplus of HK$65 billion. The forecast 2012 budget surplus of HK$8.5 billion turned into a surplus of HK$66.7 billion, and in the year before, a forecast deficit of HK$40 billion turned into a surplus of HK$26 billion. The government's efforts at medium-term forecasting are no better. The forecast in 2009 spoke of fiscal reserves in 2012-13 of HK$401.2 billion, but three years later the reality was a surplus of HK$734 billion.

So what are we to make of the story in yesterday's South China Morning Post that Tsang's forthcoming budget will feature a warning that Hong Kong's fiscal reserves of HK$734 billion will disappear in 20 years due to the cost of supporting an increasing elderly population. When the government has proved so inept at forecasting its budget for one year ahead, it is hard to believe it will do any better at forecasting the situation in 20 years' time. This dire warning is supposedly the work of the handpicked team - the Working Group on Long-Term Fiscal Planning - that was set up after the last budget.

One cannot help but feel there is an element of pre-determination here. This is the answer the government wants since it is itching to introduce a goods and services tax. However, a cursory look at some of the figures suggests the situation is not nearly so gloomy as the group suggests.

Firstly, the HK$734 billion fiscal reserves are what the government has in terms of cash accounting. Hong Kong is one of the few governments in the world to use this approach. Most use accrual accounting. It therefore makes no sense to talk in the same breath of cash reserves and long-term assets and liabilities such as pension liabilities and infrastructure spending. If we are to compare like with like, these long-term liabilities should be compared with the reserves on the accrual accounts, which the latest figures, released last month, show they are now at a massive HK$1.465 trillion.

Even this presents a highly conservative picture since the government presents the civil service pension liability as a lump sum. This has been massaged upwards from HK$534 billion in 2011 to HK$714 billion in 2013 by tinkering with the discount rate it uses to arrive at this figure. Also, the increase in the figure is strange, given that the government's final salary pension scheme closed to newcomers in 2000. It is therefore a declining liability since the people benefiting from this pension die over the next 20 to 30 years. At present, the pension liabilities are being funded to the tune of about HK$20 billion a year out of cash.

In addition, we need to consider the capital works reserve fund. which comprises funds from land sales, which amount to HK$70 billion to HK$80 billion a year. That is not going to disappear overnight. In the unlikely event that government finances do come under pressure, the government should do what governments elsewhere do and raise funds for infrastructure in the bond market, so that money for infrastructure that will last a number of generations will be paid for by the present and future generations that stand to benefit.

The one problem with this approach is that it imposes a degree of financial discipline, in that if you are borrowing at, say, 5 per cent to finance a bridge, you need to ensure a realistic price is paid by the users, which might put a dampener on some of the sillier, politically driven projects like the bridge to Macau or the high-speed train. It is bizarre for the government to pay cash for infrastructure and talk about borrowing to pay health-care bills.

Indeed, the government doesn't need to look 20 years ahead. If it needs to raise money, it can do so relatively easily since it is currently more or less debt-free. To say that Hong Kong has a structural deficit is simply nonsense. It is evident from the past few budgets that it has an embarrassment of riches and the government's problem has been to try to hide the extent of the largesse. So this exercise, as others have observed, is simply scaremongering in an effort to browbeat the Legislative Council into agreeing to the introduction of a goods and service tax.

But people will not be fooled by this. Coming together with the anger and annoyance with constitutional reform, you can't help feeling that the government is setting itself up for another political crisis with this.

 

[Equalisation]

Give us back all OUR blood and sweat CPF money at age 55 NOWWWWW !!!