Credit regulations in Norway, 1970-2008

Norwegian credit markets were heavily transformed during the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 70s credit policy aimed at "credit planning" by means of a comprehensive set of regulations, while by the end of the 1980s quantitative regulations, interest rate controls and foreign exchange controls had been fully removed.

This report aims at giving a detailed summary of the regulatory changes related to Norwegian credit markets in the period 1970-2008. We have extracted the main content from 4 different series of official documents (Ministry of Finance (1969a- 2007a, 1970b-2008b), Norges Bank (1970a-2008a) and Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (1986-2008)) and used this information to provide a unified presentation of the development. All the regulatory instruments that were used in the 1970s are described, and a detailed chronological description shows how and when these were applied. We also look at how the regulations were subsequently removed. Accompanying the description are 12 comprehensive tables in the Appendix. These summarise all the central information from the description, and in addition they contain some extra details. For instance, Table A.3 gives the level of the primary reserve requirements at each point in time, just as Table A.7 does for placement requirements, while Table A.6 contains details about all placement requirements that have been in place.