NEWS

Norway unexpectedly took almost $400 million from its sovereign wealth fund in August, marking the first such withdrawal in over a year as western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer takes advantage of its enormous piggy bank amid a decline in oil prices.

Tapping the world’s biggest wealth fund remains an extremely rare occurrence in Norway. The government made its first ever withdrawal in 2016, following a collapse in crude prices. The huge fiscal buffer that the fund represents has helped Norway’s central bank avoid some of the extremes of monetary stimulus to which its peers have had to resort.

The finance ministry in Oslo has yet to give an official reason for its latest withdrawal, which comes after oil prices dropped to a seven-month low in early August. But the decision suggests Norway’s budget may have grown more sensitive to volatility in commodity prices after the Conservative-led government spent record amounts of the country’s income from fossil fuels.

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