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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Btw was just announced that the fund (Oljefondet as it's known as here) will work on withdrawing all investments in Russia.

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I don’t get how this works. If the fund invested in Russian assets they are probably down a lot in value now. If they liquidate them will Russia allow that money to even leave the country? If these assets are outside Russia I guess it’s straightforward but still they probably lost either a large percentage or the full amount of their Russian investment

The only thing changing is the ownership of the underlying asset (shares in Russian companies). There is no money going in or out of Russia.

Huh???

If the Norwegian fund is selling it's equity stakes in Russian companies, it's going to expect something in return, and that something is usually money, which the Norwegians have no plans to leave in Russia, as getting out of Russian assets is the whole reason for the divestiture in the first place.

The fund can sell its stake to anyone and accept payment in any currency from any bank in the world. The money doesn't have to come from inside Russia.

This is going to be hard now.

I hope they've started doing that, say, a couple of weeks ago. If so, they could have a good chance to liquidate most of their positions and transfer the funds.

Do they have any investments in Saudi Arabia?

You can find an overview over the fund's investments here:

https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/

I don't know if they completely sold all their investments in Saudi Arabia, but they sold down drastically a couple of years ago.

Does that literally translate to oil fund?

Most people call it that, but the fund’s formal name is the Government Pension Fund Global

olje = oil

fond = fund

-et is the definite article "the", which in Scandinavian can be appended

thus "the oil fund"

Guess that makes the slightly different Olfondet "the beer fund?"

i think someone stole your umlaut!

> -et is the definite article "the", which in Scandinavian can be appended

Ohh, I've seen this a lot. Huset, systembolaget, etc. That makes sense.

-en and -et for genders ... it's quite neat. confer hjaelm (helmet) with helmet in english, and you can see it seems to still show through in modern English, in random spots of course.

I know it's topical at the moment, and hey its good PR to take a stand, but frankly it's a tad inconsistent.

So their argument is that a nuclear super power invaded a country with little to no provocation, so hey let's make a point and disinvest.

So far so good. Definitely a good position to take, and one I agree with. Then again Iraqis are wondering why they are still invested in Apple, a US company...

What about it is inconsistent?

The inconsistencies is that the US has invaded and toppled far more governments than Russia has

Not in Europe, and Norway is European, at the end of the day.

> Not in Europe

They toppled what they had to during WW II and have had the occupying army there to this day making sure that they don't have to topple anything for the forseeable future.

Hang on, so a moral stance has a geographical limit? Picking on states "far away" is acceptable, neighbors is not?

So US invading Canada is unacceptable but Iraq is OK? Or Canada is also OK because its not part of Europe?

Yes, cultural and geographical proximity matters.

We're not robots.

Yeah only Bosnia and Yugoslavia in Europe since WWII

Was asking the same thing. Why some people think the US is entitled to do such things while criticize anyone else who does the same thing?

I’m certainly not a US supporter but their intention wasn’t to annex Iraqi territory.

It's not entirely clear that that's Putin's intention either. It may well be to install a friendly pro-russian government. In which case the US in Iraq starts to look not-so-different. I don't think either is remotely justifiable.

No, it is clear that that’s Putin’s intention. What on earth are you talking about?

I’ve heard a lot of people suggesting that Putin won’t try to occupy Ukraine, but instead turn it into a satellite state ala Belarus. Is that any better? Probably not. But I’m not convinced what the US and UK have done in Iraq is any better either.

That's what the US war machine wants peasants to believe (or maybe those dumbasses actually believe it themselves, I wouldn't bet against it).

Russia may take the Russian-speaking parts and annex it... but they are run by very smart people, so they are not going to try to annex a territory which has a large population of native-Ukrainian speakers brainwashed against them... which could lead to long never-ending civil war. Not to mention, Ukraine is literally the poorest country in Europe (gdp/capita), so if they annex it, it will be more of a libility than anything even if they could guarantee some form of peace.

They'll try to recreate what they have in Belarus in Ukraine i.e. get rid of the puppet America has installed and install their own.

Everyone criticizing the war in the middle east always seems to casually forget that terrorists from this region hijacked airplanes and destroyed the two tallest buildings in the US with them, killing thousands.

Did Ukraine do anything like that to Russia?

> that terrorists from this region

I'm not trying to argue that Saddam Hussein was a nice man... But that's a stretch to still attempt to justify the US invasion of Iraq with 9/11. That's like saying the US should attack Germany because some the 9/11 hijackers lived here and studied here. And France, because "it's in the region". Or bombing Canada because Mexican narco criminals repeatedly murdered US citizens and Canada happens to be in the region (and supports narco terrorism by buying some of the drugs).

Most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi nationals, none were Iraqi. The "mastermind", according to US intelligence, was bin Laden, a Saudi national (who was technically stateless after his citizenship was stripped by the Saudis long before 9/11), who resided in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Sudan and Saudi Arabia before that). The US Senate investigation found that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi nation had no role in 9/11.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia%E2%80%93United_St....

The only connection between 9/11 and the invasion/occupation was made in the media.

Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks and US leadership was aware of that at the time.

Remind me again which of the attackers was Iraqi?

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