Norway’s sovereign wealth fund on Tuesday reported third-quarter profit of 835 billion Norwegian kroner ($76.3 billion), citing a stock market boost from falling interest rates.
The so-called Government Pension Fund Global, one of the world’s largest investors, said it had a value of 18.870 trillion kroner at the end of September.
The fund’s overall return for the quarter was 4.4%, which was 0.1 percentage points lower than the return of a benchmark index set by Norway’s Finance Ministry. The benchmark index against which the fund measures itself is based on the FTSE Global All Cap index for equities and Bloomberg Barclays indexes for fixed income.
Trond Grande, deputy CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, said recent changes in monetary policy had “a pretty significant impact” on the fund’s third-quarter results.
“It’s been quite an eventful quarter if you think about it. It started with a lot of volatility throughout summer in July and into August and then you had the speculation of a soft landing and whether the Fed would cut,” Grande told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on Tuesday.
“What I think you have seen from our numbers is that with a rising tide, all boats rise, right? And so, you saw a very broad increase in the stock market based on lower interest rates, essentially.”
The headquarters of the Norges Bank, Norway’s central bank, in Oslo, Norway, on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024.
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The results come shortly after NBIM warned that elevated uncertainty and a “completely different geopolitical situation” meant there were now more risks to global stocks.
Equities, which accounted for 71.4% of the fund in the third quarter, notched a return of 4.5%. The return on the fixed-income investments, which account for 26.8% of the fund’s assets, stood at 4.2% over the period.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, was established in the 1990s to invest the surplus revenues of the country’s oil and gas sector. To date, the fund has put money in more than 8,760 companies in 71 countries around the world.
Tech warning
A global easing cycle is currently under way, with major central banks taking steps to soften their aggressive stances on monetary policy as inflation falls in many high-income countries.
The U.S. Federal Reserve delivered a jumbo interest rate cut of half a percentage point last month. The Bank of England lowered rates for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic in August, and the European Central Bank last week moved to cut rates for the third time this year.
The Bank of Japan, however, held interest rates steady last month as it continues to tread cautiously on normalizing monetary policy. Japan’s central bank is regarded as something of an outlier in the global shift toward easing.
Asked about the outlook for tech stocks over the coming months, NBIM’s Grande said: “That’s a difficult question, right? Because tech has had such a phenomenal ride on the back of all the hype — let’s call it hype — about AI.”
“So, I think it’s a situation where you need to be maybe a little bit careful,” he added.
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