Norway’s US$1-trillion fund—the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund—sent shockwaves through global markets nearly two years ago when it said in November 2017 that it recommended the removal of oil and gas stocks—around US$35 billion worth of shares—from the fund’s equity benchmark index to make Norway’s wealth and economy less vulnerable to a permanent drop in oil and gas prices.
The initial proposal of the fund—which has amassed its vast wealth from none other than Norway’s oil and gas revenues and is therefore commonly referred to as ‘the oil fund’--was to dump all oil stocks from its portfolio, including significant stakes in Big Oil worth billions of U.S. dollars each.
Nearly two years later, after compromises and subsector changes in the index provider FTSE Russell that Norway uses as a reference, the initial proposal of dumping more than US$35 billion of oil stocks has been now narrowed down to stakes in purely exploration and production companies worth a total of less than US$6 billion—and also worth less than the fund’s stake in Shell alone.
Norwegian economists tell Bloomberg that the heavily reduced (not final yet) list of oil stocks for sale will likely have a very small effect and is reduced to a “symbolic” divestment, while Greenpeace’s finance campaign director for the Nordics, Martin Norman, described to Bloomberg the whittled-down proposal as “completely scandalous.”...MOREOddly reminiscent of the hunger strike the Yale grad students went on a couple years ago where they would fast until they got hungry.
Then they would eat, but with one or another of their brothers or sisters in the fight against Yale's oppression stepping up and not eating, so that there was always someone not eating.
They got angry when accused of, at best, running a "symbolic" hunger strike and more realistically. pure bafflegab silliness where words have no meaning.*
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/04/26/local-33-members-begin-hunger-strike/
https://newbostonpost.com/2017/04/28/symbolic-hunger-striking-at-yale/
https://wcuquad.com/6008546/op-ed/yale-grad-students-launch-symbolic-hunger-strike/*See also Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, ch. 2:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
