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Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has ballooned so much due to high oil and gas prices that every person in the country became a theoretical millionaire this week. The Nordic nation is proving to be an exception as others struggle under a mountain of debts. Set up in 1990, the fund owns around 1 percent of the world's stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston. The surplus revenue is collected in the Government Pension Fund Global. A preliminary counter on the website of the central bank, which manages the fund, rose to 5.11 trillion kroner (£503.46 billion/$828.66 billion). This equates to fractionally more than a million times Norway's most recent official population estimate of 5,096,300. It was the first time it reached the equivalent of a million kroner each, central bank spokesman Thomas Sevang said. Not that Norwegians will be able to access or spend the money - it is squirreled away for a rainy day for them and future generations. Norway has resisted the temptation to splurge all the windfall since striking oil in the North Sea in 1969. Finance Minister Siv Jensen told Reuters the fund, called the Government Pension Fund Global, had helped iron out big, unpredictable swings in oil and gas prices. Norway is the world's number seven oil exporter. 'Many countries have found that temporary large revenues from natural resource exploitation produce relatively short-lived booms that are followed by difficult adjustments,' she said in an email. | 
