Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how the Norwegian oil fund conducts a custodial finance that is constitutive of the contemporary social contact and that always already entails questions of ethics and politics.

Paper long abstract:

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) - better known as the 'oil fund' - is currently the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. In this paper, I investigate ethnographically the complex relationships that the operation, governance, and use of GPFG involve. In particular, I explore the ways in which GPFG closely connects monetary, fiscal, and labour policies, and how it subjects these to democratic governance and decision-making. I moreover investigate how these relationships entails that the fund conducts a 'custodial finance', where it has a duty of care to act with the Norwegian public in mind, and serves to meet a multitude of social commitments. On this basis, I investigate how GPFG is central to the relationship between the individual and the collective, and to the relationship between past, present, and future generations of Norwegians, and thus plays a constitutive role for the contemporary social contract. In addition, I propose that the fund poses a profoundly anthropological problem, as it renders continued social co-existence a matter of concern and an object of experimental intervention. Finally, the paper aims to shed light on how finance plays a central role for the everyday functioning of the contemporary welfare state, and how questions of ethics and politics are always already immanent to this mode of finance.