OSLO: Norway’s central bank will sell foreign exchange equivalent of 700 million crowns ($89.7 million) per day in February after selling 500 million crowns worth of currency per day in January, it said in a statement on Friday.
The bank is selling the currency because the government’s transfers to its $850 billion sovereign wealth fund have been smaller than earlier expected and the budget is spending more of its oil related income.
The bank puts foreign currency to be given to the fund in a “buffer portfolio”, which has now become bigger than necessary and the bank repeated that it would gradually reduce the size of this buffer this year by selling foreign exchange in the market.
The bank made its first purchase of crowns in October to cover the government’s non-oil-related budget deficit, a practice the central bank governor earlier said currency markets should get used to.
