Norway’s Trade Minister Trond Giske told in an interview that Norway won’t be a refuge in the event of a Greek default. While the region’s banks would not take a big direct hit, indirect consequences from banks in Central Europe getting into trouble would hit hard.Giske also said that he does not believe Norwegian economy is big enough to become a safe haven for large investors and that the krone cannot be compared to Swiss Franc. Bloomberg article on the issue also discusses the Euro ’misconstruction’.
At the turn of 2008-2009, when we were at the height of Lehman collapse induced financial crisis, EUR/NOK went from around current levels of slightly below 8 to nearly 10 in three months. Investors are still mostly bullish on the prospects of the krone. This has just as much to do with the presumed interest rate hikes as it does with the price of oil.
As far as debt markets go, a white paper by asset manager BlackRock Inc, which ranks 44 countries in a new index of sovereign risk, has highlighted Nordic countries as the safest places to invest. Norway came on top in the research report. The purpose of the research is for investors to be able to better determine a risk premium when taking on sovereign debt.
Due to the aforementioned small size of the Norwegian economy and the fact that the State does not loan much does mean that taking on Norwegian debt instruments is only an option on a small scale. Here are CNBC’s and Wall Street Journal’s views on the sovereign risk ranking report results.
No comments:
Post a Comment