For private bankers sitting in Zurich, London or New York, wealth management in the Nordic region can look very odd indeed.
It is a place where even today, the concept of privacy for the wealthy – which is after all baked right into the words ‘private banking’ – does not in some countries exist at all. In Norway, for example, anyone can visit the national tax authority’s website to see how much their neighbour – or prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre or the country’s richest person, real estate magnate Ivar Tollefsen – earned the previous year.
This striking financial transparency allied to high levels of income equality and a regional embrace of Nordic-style capitalism – a blend of free-market activity and state intervention – helps to explain why so many people in the region are relaxed about saving for retirement.
This is key to understanding why the five nation states that make up...
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