At the GPFG’s current value, this is equivalent to NOK 100 billion. Renewable energy infrastructure investments will reduce equity and bond investments by an equivalent amount. Therefore, the risk-adjusted return on the infrastructure investments should be at least as high as the return on the securities that we could otherwise have had. Our managers have assessed the risk associated with governance and sustainability in some companies as so high that we have divested. Most often, these have been companies with business models that are not sustainable in the long term. This group also includes companies that emit particularly large amounts of greenhouse gases or engage in activities that contribute to deforestation. In addition to such risk-based divestments, we sometimes exclude companies on the basis of ethical guidelines. These guidelines are set by the Ministry of Finance and serve as the basis for the Council on Ethics’ advice and our decisions on exclusions. Ethical exclusions are not based on financial risk considerations, but on whether a company’s operations or behaviour is in violation of fundamental ethical norms. Two of the criteria for exclusion are related to greenhouse gas emissions. One of the criteria applies to mining companies or power producers with substantial emissions from coal, in either 6/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  absolute terms or as a relative share of their operations. In all, 82 companies have been excluded from the GPFG’s investment universe based on the coal criterion.
Such parallels would paint far too simple a picture of monetary policy and would give the impression that there is a precision and exactness in monetary policy – a possibility  18  For a slightly older, but still very readable article, see Rogerson, Richard (1997), “Theory Ahead of Language in Economics of Unemployment”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (1), pp. 73–92. A more recent reference that is also relevant in this context is Carlsson, Mikael (2012), “Monetary policy and unemployment: A conceptual review”, under publication in Sveriges Riksbank Economic Review 2012:3. The problems with basing economic policy on estimated trends and long-run equilibria are illustrated in, for instance, Orphanides, Athanasios (2004), “Monetary Policy Rules, Macroeconomic Stability and Inflation: A View from the Trenches”, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 36(2), pp. 151–175 and Orphanides, Athanasios and Simon van Norden (2002), “The Unreliability of Output-Gap Estimates in Real Time”, Review of Economics and Statistics LXXXIV (4), pp. 569–583. 19  There is support for this view in research, see for example Blinder, Alan S. and John Morgan (2005), “Are Two Heads Better Than One? Monetary Policy by Committee”, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking vol. 37, pp. 789–812. BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  to “fine tune” – that simply does not exist. This would possibly give an illusion of “clarity” but would, as I see it, merely be a chimera.20 The Riksbank is hardly unique in this respect.