Financial Regulation

Note: This is the English version of an Op-Ed published in Aftenposten, Norway\'s leading newspaper on the 21st of October entitled "Conspicous by its absence"

Norway’s economy is heavily exposed to events and policy shifts around the world, even more so than that of other small countries.  The exposure mainly from trade and the investments of the oil fund. Yet, there is an absence of strategy on how best to manage this exposure.

Norway can only do so much against the daily travails of the oil and financial markets that it is so exposed to. However, it can have much greater influence on global and particularly European financial reform efforts that are changing how these markets work.  Inexplicably, it has chosen to forgo such influence.

As part of the single market, from which Norway derives significant benefits, it is obliged to adopt most EU financial regulations into its domestic legislation. However, it has little formal influence on what form these take. Norway does have an ‘observer’ status in some regulatory groupings; this brings a ‘voice’ but no ‘vote’.

Re-Define Managing Director Sony Kapoor sat down with the Real News Network on one of his visits to Washington DC and gave a series of wide-ranging interviews on the difficulty of getting the right financial regulation, the extreme fragility of the economic recovery, the sheer scale of the problem of rising unemployment and stagnating wages, the problems of collective action faced by institutions and governments and a number of other topical issues including the question of what should be done with institutions such as Goldman Sachs.