Norwegian Minister of trade and industry Sylvia Brustad (Labour) finds herself in a bit of a pickle following the partly government-owned company Aker Solutions‘  NOK 1.39 billion acquisition of other companies in the Aker system, controlled by industrialist Kjell Inge Røkke. Acquisitions resulting in the Aker Solutions shares’ substantial drop on the stock exhanges.
These highly disputed transactions led Ms Brustad to carry out a speedy inquiry concluding that the transactions were a matter for the general assembly.
The deal is also seen as an embarrassment to the government, which came to …

According to Norwegian newspapers, the electric car manufacturer Think‘s financial reserves will last only a couple of days. It isn’t the first time, though, as the company, dating back to the early 1990′s, was sold to the Ford Motor Company in 1999, to an international car manufacturing group in 2003, but has been on Norwegian hands for the last couple of years.
Even if the implications of a bankruptcy are serious for those involved, they really aren’t that many. Comparing with the international auto industry crisis just isn’t fair, but it …

Talk about bad timing, financial unrest considered and all. Nevertheless I stumbled upon these bottles of “champagne” for kids in the neighbourhood’s #1 supermarket yesterday. It goes without saying that the children of well to do areas need to acquire basic skills in handling bare essentials, such as the prescribed number of Dom Perignons a day (if not necessarily extra brut — initially, anyway), but, as mentioned, the timing could have been better, of course.
The local chief constable reported several credit crunch-related, self-inflicted homicides over the last month, the other …

Amid daily news of an ever-crumbling US auto industry, there’s been much talk of the bailout the automaker CEOs tried to negotiate in Washington DC the other day, among so many bailouts that it’s beginning to get increasingly harder to believe in the Federal Reserve’s ability to carry the weight. President-elect Barack Obama acted pretty swiftly on the matter, too, on the first possible occasion – during his wife’s and his guided tour of The White House the other week.
If action isn’t taken, and taken fast, the entire industry is …

The Norwegian population said no to EU membership, not once, but twice; in the 1972 and the 1994 referendums. Why? Only years before the 1972 referendum it became clear that Norway’s economy was in for a major boost, facilitating unprescedented wealth for one of Europe’s up until then poorest nations. A wealth which definitely had taken effect by 1994, at which point we turned down membership once more.
Even though we were stinking rich at the time, the debate revolved around this single issue: What’s in it for us? Of course …

When the very symbols of America and everything American – Chrysler, Ford and GM – need a USD 25 billion dollar federal rescue plan in order to survive… That’s when you know The Great Depression 2™ simply has to be just around the corner. I think we’d be well advised not to look at recent developments in the American economy as an American problem, as Wall Street (and the American economy as such) has a huge impact on just about any economy in the world. There’s a contradiction in there, …

It’s a bit ironic, wouldn’t you say, that the current American administration (through the Fed), champion of the free market and freedom of enterprise, just recently nationalised Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and, so far, AIG – a measure usually attributed to socialists like Hugo Chávez and the likes of him.
Still, you can’t blame them for trying to avoid a collapse, which seems more and more inevitable day by day. And then, of course, there’s the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, just one day ahead of the AIG intervention. Norwegian banks and finance …