Norway

One story that has not made much headlines in the MSM is the sudden escalation in hostilities between Iraqi's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and Norwegian E&P company DNO International ASA. The firm, whose trading on the Oslo exchange was suspended yesterday, and which likely will not trade for several days, has seen a forced halt to its key Iraq oil exploration over a dispute involving a potentially illegal stock sale. As Iraq operations account for a bulk of the company's enterprise value, many shareholders will be quite concerned when shares resume trading sometime on Wednesday.

Long perceived as a bastion of stability due to their oil-extraction based economy, and socialist system that the US can only dream to emulate, today the Norwegian Central Bank conducted a Dutch auction in which it exchanged NOK10 billion of government securities for residential and commercial mortgage loans. And not just any loans, but including those denominated in SEK, DKK, EUR, USD, GBP and CHF (well, in retrospect, looks like pretty much any loans). Exchange swaps will cover maturities between December 2012 and 2014. But aside from the specifics, it seems that even the Norges are starting to monetize MBS: a process demonstrated to work phenomenally well at propping up a hollow economy by the likes of economic alchemists such as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner.

Bloomberg has done a good (and lengthy) analysis of the worst year ever of the world's third largest sovereign wealth fund, the $300 billion Norway Government Pension Fund.