Capital and Owners in Finland | Samuli Knüpfer | Neuvottelija 184

Disclosure

The host states in the episode that his firm, Translink Corporate Finance, contributed a small sum towards establishing the professorship of ownership discussed here.

Summary

Samuli Knüpfer, professor of ownership at Aalto University, came on to work through Finnish wealth and ownership in Nordic comparison.

The Nordics are two groups, not one. Sweden and Denmark are in a league of their own; Finland and Norway look roughly alike. Norway’s position surprises, given the oil fund, and Knüpfer explains it historically: Norway was poor for a long time before oil, the fund is comparatively young, and the whole design keeps the money out of citizens’ accounts. Neither Finland nor Norway has a long history of ownership and accumulating wealth. As Finnish particularities he names the state’s large role, the weight of big corporations, and a German-style Mittelstand layer that is far thinner here than in Sweden or Denmark.

One number explains most of it. A Finnish household holds about 40 per cent of its financial wealth in deposits, against roughly 20 in Sweden and Denmark — and the single largest gap comes from unlisted shares, which tells the underlying story: more happens outside the stock exchange in Sweden and Denmark. The other Nordics have distinctly more companies per capita, and Finland is the only one of the four with fewer. The stock exchange offers no relief either: Sweden has some 800 listed companies to Finland’s two hundred at roughly twice the size.

The most striking finding is about attitudes. Finland places worst of the four on financial literacy, around tenth internationally where the others are among the best. But Knüpfer finds the soft measure more interesting: Finns view competition as considerably more harmful than other Nordics do, and of all the economic-belief statements compared internationally, that is the largest single divergence.

On venture capital he inverts the usual explanation. Finland comes last of the four in investment volumes, and in his view this is not for want of money or of good investors but for want of good targets — which returns to the same root, that there are simply fewer companies. Asked why growth stalls at a certain stage, he says plainly that he does not know, and leaves the question open.

His proposals are concrete. Remove the cap on the equity savings account and allow funds into it as well as shares. More importantly, give individuals some contact with their own pension saving as Sweden and Norway do — his argument being about learning rather than returns. On state ownership his demand is procedural: there should be a stated line on why the state owns a given company and it should be kept, because a state owner’s only real asset is credibility with other investors. Asked whether all current holdings meet a justification such as an unbreakable monopoly or a genuine strategic interest, he answers that they certainly do not.

He is careful about blaming Finnish savers. Once tax and pension contributions come out of a salary many have little left to invest, and the norm of paying off the home quickly has its own logic — reinforced, Miettinen adds, by an owner-occupied home being in practice the only tax-free asset class in Finland. Still, Knüpfer maintains a large part of it is simply the way things are done here, and notes that change is real but slow: about 40 per cent of households now hold shares or funds, approaching fifty.

The episode closes on ESG, which Knüpfer places by default inside the economic dimension rather than against it, and on the edge case Miettinen raises, where a company captured into projects benefiting the owning circle is a principal-agent problem dressed in a responsibility framework.

Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Pääoma ja omistajat Suomessa | Samuli Knüpfer | Neuvottelija 184. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.