About the AUD/NOK rate
The AUD/NOK rate is how many NOK one Australian dollar buys. It moves constantly with interest-rate expectations, commodity prices and global risk sentiment - see what moves the rate. Tradergy shows the mid-market reference rate and does not forecast where it’s heading. For the 52-week highs and lows and a daily table, see the AUD/NOK rate history.
Related views of this rate: the reverse rate, NOK → AUD, is on the receiving Norwegian krone view, and sending Australian dollars to Norway is covered on the AUD → NOK transfer page. Every AUD pair sits on the convert hub, and to work in more than one currency at once there is the currency converter.
How Norway converts its oil money
Norges Bank targets inflation, not the krone. Its operational target is annual consumer price inflation close to 2 per cent over time, pursued flexibly so that it also supports high and stable output and employment, and the policy rate is the instrument it names as most important. The exchange rate is not aimed at.
The Bank nonetheless conducts a large and continuous currency operation, and it does so as an agent for someone else. Norway's petroleum revenue arrives partly in krone and partly in foreign currency; the Government Pension Fund Global, established in law in 1990 and first funded in 1996, is invested exclusively abroad; and the state's budget deficit is covered by drawing on it. Converting between those flows falls to Norges Bank, which the Ministry of Finance tasks with the transactions and which runs them through a separate petroleum buffer portfolio.
What makes the arrangement unusual is that it is published before it happens. The Bank spreads the transactions evenly across the year and announces the daily amounts in a press release each month, so that market participants know in advance how much will be converted. An official flow of that size is ordinarily something a central bank conceals; here it is a schedule.
The size of the drawdown is itself governed by a rule. Spending from the fund is limited to its expected real return, estimated at around 3 per cent a year, which is what stops the capital being consumed - so the amount of currency Norges Bank has to convert is bounded by a formula the government cannot vary at will.
Sources: Norges Bank, mandate for monetary policy · Norges Bank, monetary policy · Norges Bank, foreign exchange transactions on behalf of the government · Norges Bank Investment Management, about the fund