Norway's well run sovereign wealth fund.
Newsweek interviews Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg on how the country weathered the Great Recession with an unemployment rate of 3.3 percent. The secret to the country's success is, obviously, its huge oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. But the country has plowed the profits from its oil sales into a sovereign wealth fund worth $450 billion. Says Stoltenberg:
We have the most transparent and most predictable investment fund in the world. The reason we have this sovereign fund is we have saved most of the oil revenues rather than spend them on tax cuts. Our value-added tax is 25 percent and gasoline price is $8 per gallon. The whole idea is to replace our national wealth from oil and gas in the ground to equity and bonds in the international market. It has been important for the Norwegian government to avoid Dutch disease by not spending too much.
Could U.S. leaders be similarly responsible? I somehow doubt it.
