Norway's Wealth Fund Divests From 11 Israeli Companies
Talk us through the explanation from the CEO, Nikolai Tangen, about this decision. I mean, is it really a sign that there's going to be more financial pressure on Israel in the future? Yeah, I mean, I think two things can be said about this. Number one, the sovereign wealth fund is going to be holding a press conference later today to give some clarity here, because when you pass out the statement, it looks like they've divested or in the process of divesting from 11 companies, but remain invested in something like 50 within Israel. And we don't really have the name, so it's really hard to tell. Now, in terms of the external managers, yes, they've ended those mandates and they've brought it in-house, which they say is at the sort of the the encouragement of the Ministry of Finance. So hopefully we'll get clarity on all of that later today. What's interesting about this is that you're seeing this divergence in the investment community with regard to Israeli assets. So if you look at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, it was one of the best performing equity benchmarks in the world in the first six months. The shekel was one of the best performing currencies. In the last four months, IPO volume has tripled. The amount of tech investment is the highest in three years, with big marquee names like Google, Palo Alto Networks and Nvidia making investments in Israel in the last several months. So again, and this is divergence, but Israeli assets as a whole don't seem to be suffering. They are amongst the best performing in the world. Okay. So that's the financial pressure or lack thereof. What about the political pressure? Because we know that the person who really could influence Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is Donald Trump. Has his position changed at all when it comes to Bibi's plans to track and occupy Gaza City? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. And the short answer is it's very hard to tell. Now, we know that roughly, I guess a couple of weeks ago, he came out and said quite strongly that, you know, he was very concerned by the humanitarian situation, something along the lines of, you know, we've got to get the kids fed. And since then, I think you've seen this renewed effort to sort of up the humanitarian efforts there. There are questions about how effective that that those are. What was also interesting, though, with regard to kind of the political side of it and the plan to go into Gaza City was that we had the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee, in an interview last week. Now, he was not unequivocal in terms of supporting that plan, but he did say, look, the U.S. fundamentally will support Israel in making tough decisions, which I think most people interpreted as, you know, a degree of support for the military plans. But again, I think increasing concerns about the humanitarian situation.
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