Listen and subscribe to Opening Bid Unfiltered on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
The leader of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund is locked in on the United States’ rising debt levels.
“We do observe that the budget deficit is quite large,” Norges Investment Bank CEO Nicolai Tangen told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi on a new episode of the Opening Bid podcast (watch above; listen below). “That’s not only the case in the US but across the world.”
The Trump administration’s “big, beautiful bill,” signed on July 4, is anticipated to add as much as $3.3 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade.
“We are at roughly a hundred trillion dollars [in global debt] according to the IMF,” Tangen explained. “The question is whether there will be a time where investors will certainly think, hey, we want a higher coupon for lending money to these various governments. And that’s potentially when we could see an uplift in interest rate levels generally.”
Although he considers the US to be in “a bit of a special situation” due to its status as a reserve currency, “you never know when the point is coming where investors suddenly decide that the debt level is too high and want a higher price.”
Tangen’s take on the US debt level is of particular importance.
The 1969 discovery of a reserve of oil off Norway’s shores created a high-class dilemma about what to do with the resulting influx of cash. Norges Bank set up the nation’s Global Pension Fund to shield the country’s economy from the volatility of oil, according to Norges Bank’s website.
The fund invests only abroad and owns 9,000 global companies, which represent nearly 1.5% of all listed company shares globally. It also owns considerable amounts of real estate around the world and has over $2.8 trillion in assets under management.
Tangen has held his position at Norges Bank since 2020 and is also the host of a popular podcast called “In Good Company,” with a current run of 125 episodes that features the CEOs of companies the fund owns. Tangen’s contract as CEO was reupped for another five years several months ago.
The fund is bullish on many sectors, including tech, and owns large-cap names such as Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Tesla (TSLA), and Meta (META).
“Microsoft is our biggest holding,” he explained. “That’s because it is a very, very large company. Now, what we are seeing is that we have a bigger concentration level in the portfolio than we’ve had in the past.”
