Norway wealth fund CEO warns of potential total value loss in stress-test scenarios

When the person managing $2 trillion of a nation’s savings starts talking about losing all of it, people tend to listen. Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, has issued warnings about extreme downside scenarios that could devastate Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet. The fund, built from decades of surplus petroleum revenues and designed to secure wealth for future generations of Norwegians, holds diversified positions across equities, fixed income, real estate, and renewable infrastructure in markets around the world. The stress tests that keep Oslo up at night In a risk assessment published in March 2026, NBIM laid out two particularly grim scenarios. The first involves what Tangen has called an “AI bubble,” a situation where the sky-high valuations propping up technology stocks come crashing back to earth. Under that modeling, the fund could lose roughly 35% of its value. For context, 35% of $2 trillion is approximately $700 billion. The second nightmare scenario involves geopolitical upheaval: trade restrictions, severe tariffs, and the kind of international friction that makes global capital markets sei...