War on Cash: Norway to Scrap 1,000 NOK Bill Because 'Economic Crime'

In the background, we note that since ending the gold standard in 1914, inflation in Norway has accumulated to 6,457% (through 2025)

I rarely comment on current events in these pages since the acute Covid shitshow ended, if only due to the superficiality of the issues involved.

Today, however, we’ll make an exception as Norway reportedly mulls scrapping the 1,000 Norwegian Crowns (NOK) bill for the most inane reasons: politicos™ making fastidious claims of one thing while pursuing other things.

So, here’s former NATO court jester and current Norwegian finance minister Jens Stoltenberg and his ‘splanation for the impending scrapping of the equivalent of the US$ 100 bill (as of 16 Jan. 2026, 1,000 NOK = US$ 98.86), and imagine doing some grocery shopping in small bills while reading on.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Stoltenberg Wants to Scrap the 1,000 NOK Note

The Ministry of Finance believes [sic] that the banknote is being misused and plays an important role in the criminal economy.

By Kristian Elster and Sverre Holm-Nilsen, NRK, 15 Jan. 2026 [source; archived]

The Ministry of Finance sent a letter to Norges Bank [that’s Norway’s central bank] on Thursday. In the letter, they ask the bank to consider scrapping the 1,000 NOK note as part of the fight against financial crime.

In the letter, the Ministry of Finance refers, among other things, to statements from Økokrim [that would be the country’s financial/white collar crime fighters]: Banknotes cannot be traced and are anonymous, and therefore they are sought after by criminals.

– It will help us fight financial crime by making it more difficult for criminals to pay in cash and launder money. Denmark abolished the thousand kroner note last year, and Økokrim has clearly recommended that we do the same, writes Stoltenberg on his Facebook page.

[as a service to you, dear readers, here’s the full statement™ by the dude cosplaying finance minister on social media:

When was the last time you held one of these in your hands?

I didn’t remember that when I got my hands on this 1000 NOK note, but some people still use it. Unfortunately, much of the use of the 1000 NOK note is linked to financial crime. That’s why I’ve sent a letter to Norges Bank today asking them to consider removing it completely.

It will help us fight financial crime by making it more difficult for criminals to pay in cash and launder money. Denmark removed the 1,000 crown [DKK] note last year, and Økokrim has clearly recommended that we do the same [yeah, like almost two years ago (early March 2024), hence why the need to follow-up now?].

Financial crime undermines our social model. To step up the fight, the government will also propose strengthening money laundering regulations in line with what Europe [meant is the EU] is introducing. And we will propose lowering the ceiling on how much you can pay in cash from 40,000 to 10,000 NOK [this comes in addition to excitement over, say, Spain now requiring gov’t permission for cash payments over 3,000 euros or dollars, and now Norway proposes to limit such payments to about 1,000 euros or dollars; here’s a helpful list of the current limits to cash payments in the EU courtesy of the European Consumer Centre].

People should still be able to use cash if they want or need it in their everyday lives. The largest banknotes in particular are used in the criminal economy, and without the 1,000 NOK note, things could become more difficult than they are today.

I’ll delimit myself to but two brief notes here: given the insane cost-of-living coupled with runaway inflation (see below for further particulars), my grocery bills are around 2,000 NOK per week: but, hey, I’ll gladly pay with 50s and 100s, because I kinda like running around carrying many small notes…]

The Minister of Finance says that the proposal is part of a larger package to combat financial crime:

We are sending a large package of measures against money laundering for consultation [more cosplaying, as the above-related Facebook posting—which, incidentally, is linked but not cited in full in the NRK piece—clearly places the agency in this regard into Brussels’ hands, not those of Mr., Stoltenberg and his ilk].

Assessment Underway

Torbjørn Hægeland, Director of Financial Stability at Norges Bank, says that there have been major changes in cash use and the payment system since they last assessed the composition of the Norwegian banknotes:

That is why Norges Bank is already [remember: we’re two years after that assessment™] starting a new assessment, where we are, among other things, in dialogue with Økokrim. We will respond to the letter from the Ministry of Finance when the assessment is completed.

Almost 150 Years

The first Norwegian thousand-crown notes came into circulation in 1877. At that time, they had a picture of King Oscar II, who then reigned in Norway and Sweden [forget the nostalgic nonsense about a dude who was king; what matters is the context, and here, I’ll share some of the things that are so sooper-dooper secret™ that they are found on Wikipedia:

The history of the central bank of Norway can be traced back to 1816…the monetary unit was to be the speciedaler (rixdollar), divided into 120 skillings or five ort (‘rigsort’) of 24 skillings each.^[6] [needless to say, having, say, the decimal system wasn’t that important as these were coins made of precious metals (which the term ‘speciedaler’, or specie-dollar, also implies]

The Money Act of 17 April 1875 discontinued the terms daler [Thaler, or gulden] and skilling, and it was decided that the monetary unit should be a krone [crown], divided into 100 øre [Norway’s equivalent to the cent, i.e., its the move to the decimal system]. This was done to prepare for Norway’s entry, on 16 October that year, into the Scandinavian Monetary Union. This union had been established between Denmark and Sweden in 1873 on the recommendation of a joint commission (in which Norway participated) to establish a common Scandinavian coin based on gold. It meant that the other countries’ coins were to be legal tender on the same basis as those struck at home [it was the same principle underwriting other such monetary unions, from the Central European Conventionsthaler to the Latin Monetary Union, and all of these grandiose projects eventually failed because of excessive gov’t spending and money-printing, which eroded the currencies’ purchasing power: talk about history repeating itself; more on this below] The union functioned until 1914; thereafter it lacked all practical significance, but was not formally abolished until 1972.^[6]

So, there you have it: if there are precious metals in your money, it’s easy to have it used across borders etc.; this is why, e.g., we find Roman (!) gold coins (!!) as far away from the Empire as China, India, Sri Lanka, etc., as the awesome Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project at Oxford U has catalogued whose results are summarised in this map:

Pray tell, why? Because an ounce of gold is an ounce of gold; a scrap of paper labelled ‘legal tender’ isn’t nearly worth as much as the paper it is printed on (legally, this is what’s called a Scheidemünze, i.e., means of payment ‘whose intrinsic metal value was less than the legal value stamped on them’; we’ll revisit this issue before too long].

The newest 1,000-krone note, which was introduced in 2019, shows a wave on the front, and has a picture of the sea on the back [no-one gives a shit, but the next sentence is the one that matters].

Statistics Norway’s price calculator shows that 1,000 crowns in 1877 corresponds to 81,000 crowns today [their public records go as far back as 1865, but I’ll propose that the 1877 date used by the NRK journos™ here is only relevant if one considers the above-referenced Scandinavian Monetary Union of 1875: those 1,000 crowns back in 1877 were backed by gold, i.e., northern Europe adopted a gold standard, ‘triggered by Germany's adoption of the German gold mark in 1873’, as even (sic) Wikipedia tells the story; needless to say, and much in line with ancient (Roman), Renaissance (e.g., Venetian, Florentine), and early modern (e.g., Dutch) practices, ‘gold coins rarely circulated but the respective central banks (the Sveriges Riksbank, Danmarks Nationalbank and Norges Bank) centralized their respective gold reserves and guaranteed the conversion of krone banknotes to gold for export purposes’].

Will Lower the Amount Limit

Stoltenberg will also lower the amount limit for cash payments [quite hot news™ from the frontlines of the war on cash].

The current limit is 40,000 crowns [about US$ 4,000], but if the proposal goes through, the limit will be 10,000 crowns [or some US$ 1,000].

When asked whether criminals cannot use 500 crown notes, Stoltenberg replied that the police’s assessment is that when you remove the thousand crown note, it will be more cumbersome for them [so, this nonsense comment is literally the rending of molehills (financial crime) into mountain ranges, as the subsequent paragraphs ‘splain].

2 Per Cent of Payments [done with cash]

The Ministry of Finance says that cash only accounts for 2 per cent of the number of payments in Norway, and only 1 per cent of the total value of payments [but, hey, removing the 1,000 crown bill will certainly make life harder for organised crime, eh?].

In 2023, figures from Økokrim still showed that the cash balance was about the same as in 1996.

‘The criminal economy is still largely analog’, Økokrim wrote in its report on cash in the criminal economy [well, guess why…take your time].

‘We know that a large proportion of the cash in Norway today is used in the criminal economy’, Økokrim head Pål Lønseth told NRK in December [2025]

‘Primarily Criminals’

‘The 1,000 crown note has greater value for criminals than for ordinary consumers. We therefore applaud the Minister of Finance’s proposal’, says CEO Vegard Einan of NHO Service og Handel [that would be Norway’s second-largest trade association/chamber of commerce affiliate].

There is reason to believe that large parts of the cash economy in the Nordic countries originate from crime and are part of the criminal economy.

Thus the police in their threat assessment for 2025.

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A Few, Very Brief Comments About Central Banking

Legacy media these days operates based on two models:

1. lying by commission, i.e. outright agit-prop peddling lies, such as the notion that whatever name you wish to give to, e.g., the current quagmire in Ukraine, there’s nothing to see here before late February 2022 when Russia! Russia! Russia! began it’s ‘unprovoked war of aggression’ (oops):

   BOMBSHELL: NATO Sec-Gen Stoltenberg in Brussels: 'The war…started in 2014.'

2. lying by omission, i.e., leaving out highly relevant context, such as the Norwegian police’s ‘threat assessment for 2025’, which we’ve discussed at length earlier this year—and what’s omitted from the above piece (and public discourse at-large) is the simple factoid that most organised crime thrives in immigrant milieux, as that threat assessment spent like half of its pages on this (but they called it ‘gangs from Sweden’):

   'Gangs from Sweden' are 'the Biggest Threat' to Norwegian Society

So, with that off my chest, we may now move on to the main course, by which I mean, of course, post-gold standard inflation (gross mismanagement) of the currency by the one institution whose task notionally was: price stability.

The above piece is technically correct that there was a gold standard in place from the mid-1870 through the First World War.

Perusal of Statistics Norway’s price calculator for the gold standard period (1877-1914) yields the following results in terms of inflation:

The trajectory from 1915 through 2025 looks like this:

You saw this correctly: 1,000 crowns under the gold standard are now the functional equivalent of more than 65,500 crowns, which is tantamount to saying that hyper-inflation of 6,457% has befallen the Norwegian populace in the past century.

The only reason anyone can think about any of this as normal™ is that these 6,457% of price growth (orig. prisvekst) corresponds to an annualised—theoretical—inflation rate of 3.88%. This means that the amount of money in circulation doubles every 18-19 years.

These data are also supported by Statistics Norway’s ‘historical’ inflation, or CPI (consumer price index). Looking at more recent data (e.g., using 2015 as baseline, or index value at 100) shows consistent trends, with the average annual inflation between 4.3-4.5% throughout the post-1950 era. This in turn supports the long-term cumulative figure of 6,457% from 1915 to 2025 (but note two things: a) calculation of the CPI changed in the 1960s, but this doesn’t suggest data splice as their historical data covers the era from 1924 onwards, is based on actual prices, and, in my view the best part of it, may be accessed here).

A Brief Comparison to the U.S., 1913-25

Finally, what about a comparison to, say, the United States, specifically since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 aligns virtually perfectly with the Norwegian Central Bank’s abandonment of the gold standard in the First World War.

U.S. CPI data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (via the Fed branch in Minneapolis) shows a cumulative inflation of approximately 3,256% from 1913 to 2025 (with a CPI of 9.9 in 1913 to 322.3 in 2025).

This is roughly half the cumulative inflation for Norway over a similar time period (1915-2025) that we discussed above.

Note that the annualised inflation rate for the United States from 1913 through 2025 is about 2.7%, which compares rather favourably to Norway’s 3.88%. This is indicative of the Norwegian crown since 1914 depreciating more significantly in terms of purchasing power relative to the U.S. dollar.

I suppose that to explain this, one would likely need to focus in more detail on factors like post-war reconstructions, the temporary (and partial, or indirect) re-introduction of a gold standard by proxy during the Bretton Woods System (1944/45-mid-1970s), the petro dollar system, incl. price volatility, since then, and higher average inflation in Norway during key periods, most prominently after WW2.

Do remember: since the abandonment of the gold standard, ‘higher average inflation in Norway’ simply means ‘more gov’t spending’.

Bottom Lines

Isn’t it amazing that inflation hawks in the U.S. are yapping, supported, every now and then, by the ‘end the Fed’ crowd of various stripes.

While I’m in principle aligned with the latter, the above history of central banking and monetary policies in Norway shows one thing above everything else:

The problem isn’t the existence of a central bank per se, as indicated by remarkable high price stability during the period from the mid-1870s through 1914: inflation rose by less than 12% during the half-century before the First World War, and the explanation isn’t anything related to feelings or wishful thinking (mostly delusional).

What enabled this remarkable period was, all other things being equal, the gold standard.

But, epimetheus, this also means that the money supply may only grow in lockstep with the specie content of the currency, i.e., that means a deflationary depression.

Seriously?

I mean, yes, technically there was a kind of ‘depression’ from the crash of 1873 through the mid-1890s (which wasn’t the absence of economic growth: it was productivity growth exceeding monetary growth, i.e., wages and prices fell—which is why it’s a called depression).

But that picture changes from around the mid-1890s onwards, and you’d probably guessed already what changed this: there was innovation, for sure (the so-called second industrial revolution revolving around petrochemicals and electricity), but more importantly, it was the onset of the massive gov’t spending binge related to armaments contracts, all debt-financed, across the entire industrial world-system, including the world’s biggest economy, the United States.

So, bottom line here—the problem isn’t a central bank per se; the problem is (drum roll) shitty policies of support for gov’t spending binges, which really took off after the Second World War.

With all that history behind us, what’s the shape of things to come?

I mean, it’s obvious that we can’t do another century with another 6,500+ per cent inflation on top of what we experienced in the past 100 years.

For starters, Norway cannot go back to a gold standard because Norges Bank sold its 44 tons of gold back in 2004 (for the measly price of some US$ 447.5m), and there’s no willingness to buy gold these days.

Norway, being a prime oil & especially gas exporter could peg its currency to hydrocarbon reserves and/or sales, which would render it a kind of petro-crown. Theoretically, that’s kinda plausible, but I’m unsure if this would solve the issue at-hand, if only because—according to official data—gas production fell off a kind of cliff in 2025 compared to 2024:

Nat’l gas production in 2024 stood at 126.4 Sm3 oil equivalents (conversion rates)—while in 2025, gas production was 99.5 Sm3 oil equivalents, a 21-22% decline year over year. Let that sink in (while trying not to ponder what that might mean for Germany, which buys about half of that Norwegian production).

Germany's Gas Supplies at 46%, Yet Prices are Lower than Before Feb. 2022

So, what’s the most likely move here?

Criminalise the use of cash (check); keep it technically legal but make it super-cumbersome (given that kind of runaway inflation, even buying a coffee with cash is cumbersome, hence check); offer a digital alternative™, which, as a CBDC, will function akin to a rationing booklet.

Oh, and then there’s the tyrannical control aspect of this all, as ‘splained™ in this 0:57 minute-long clip by Jabba the Hut Agustin Carstens of the Bank for Int’l Settlements, a.k.a. the central bank of central banks:

Note that even (sic) the introduction of a CBDB will do anything about the underlying sickness of a monetary system that’s totally out of control, as indicated by hyper-inflation of 6,457% has befallen the Norwegian populace in the past century.

I merely delimit myself to noting that a revolution is long overdue.