In this day and age, receiving a cold call at any time can be disarming, but Norway’s finance minister reportedly took a most surprising ring on the streets of Oslo earlier this month.
According to Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv, the cold caller was U.S. President Donald Trump, and the request for Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, was how the American leader could be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump has been publicly explicit about his desire to be awarded the prize, which some say is a driving factor behind his efforts to broker a peace deal for Ukraine and Russia, as well as his focus on Israel and Gaza.
But in June he took to Truth Social to complain: “No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!”
This week, it will be Trump’s impact on the economy that will be in focus, as the group of Nobel Laureates that he seemingly hopes to join will meet for their annual event in Lindau, Germany.
It could make for uncomfortable listening for the White House, with one of the most famous Nobel prize-winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz telling The Guardian that “the U.S. has become, I would say, a scary place to invest.” The administration’s tariff policy risks triggering stagflation in a move that is making the Federal Reserve “clearly worried,” Stiglitz said earlier this year.
Nobel Laureate Roger Myerson, who is also attending the event in Lindau, is more concerned by American politics, writing in an opinion piece for The Hill that “when large groups of voters have become convinced that only one party really cares about them, then they may feel no stake in democracy itself… and support their leader in shaking off its inconvenient constitutional restraints.”
Meanwhile, Nobel Laureate Simon Johnson has also voiced his concerns about American isolationism, telling the Nobel Prize Conversations podcast that it is “…destroying human capital and handing a massive advantage to geopolitical competitors. It’s a self-defeating foolish action by the Trump administration.”
It’s a tough crowd for President Trump. He does have one unlikely supporter in his bid for the peace prize though. Former Democratic rival and First Lady Hillary Clinton recently said if he could end the war between Ukraine and Russia “without putting Ukraine in a position where it must concede its territory to the aggressor… I’d nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
CNBC will speak live to Nobel Laureates from the meeting in Lindau on Wednesday and Thursday, tune in to hear their views.