4 - On Managing Wealth

Summary

Introduction

From Norges Bank we can see the corner of the two streets, Tollbugaten and Kirkegaten. This is where the Collett building was situated until 1939 when it was dismantled and moved to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History at Bygdøy. By then, the Collett family had not occupied the building for years and their wealth was long gone.

Around the end of the eighteenth century, John Collett made a large fortune in the timber industry. He also ran the great Ullevål farm and by the time of his death in 1810 he was managing one of the country's largest wealth portfolios. Collett was also known to spend extravagant amounts on lavish parties. The Napoleonic Wars and the English blockade took a heavy toll on the family business. After his death, Collett's heirs insisted on maintaining an extravagant lifestyle as if the income was still intact. Their wealth rapidly withered away and in 1829 the coffers were empty. The farm was taken over by the state.

The time it took Collett to make a fortune is about the same as it took Norway to build up its oil-based financial wealth. Nearly forty years after Phillips Petroleum discovered commercially viable oil reserves in the Ekofisk field, we have an oil-based sovereign wealth fund worth more than NOK 3 trillion. Few other countries are sitting on such huge financial reserves. But our wealth primarily comes from other sources than the oil fund, now called the Government Pension Fund Global. The value of our current and future labor resources is more than ten times as great as the value of our oil and the oil fund combined. The oil fund would be depleted in three years if government tax revenues were to disappear entirely.

Our economic future depends above all on our capacity to produce goods and services that others value. But the visible oil revenues may give the impression that we have a huge treasure trove at our disposal. Sound wealth management is therefore first and foremost a question of maintaining and developing the value of our productive resources, particularly our labor resources.