| Norway, Scandinavia’s richest nation, will use a record 169 billion kroner ($26 billion) of its sovereign wealth fund to plug budget gaps as an oil boom fades, the country’s biggest bank said. “We expect that 2015 will be a rather poor year by Norwegian standards -- not a crisis, but lower growth than usual,” Kjersti Haugland, an analyst at DNB ASA, said in an interview. “It wouldn’t be seen as inappropriate to have an expansionary budget.”
The minority government will use 3 percent of the wealth fund, or about 6.6 percent of gross domestic product, Haugland said. In its May revised budget, it proposed to this year use 140.9 billion kroner, or 2.8 percent of the fund, equal to 5.8 percent of so-called trend GDP...............................................Full Article: Source
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