If you were looking for comic relief in an age of geopolitical anxiety, Sweden’s pension system has been unexpectedly obliging. In the space of a fortnight, one of Europe’s most decorous financial bureaucracies managed to produce a scandal involving emojis, a leaked recording, and an 80-billion-kronor turf war, all under the heading of “governance reform.” Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States continued its own theatre of the absurd, with a president assaulting the Federal Reserve while American markets support a nuclear-tech start-up with no reactors, no revenue, and a valuation that makes AI look like a kindergarten project.
The Gothenburg Banana Peel
The Swedish subplot begins innocuously enough. The government decides to merge the Sixth National Pension Fund (AP6, AUM: SEK 77.1 billion ≅ €7.1 billion) into its Gothenburg-based sibling, AP2 (AUM: SEK 459 billion ≅ € 42.1 billion), to “streamline” the buffer capital of the public pension system. It’s the sort of technocratic housekeeping that could have lived and died in committee minutes if it weren’t for the personal power struggles of the involved leaders and teams.
On one side, there is Eva Halvarsson, long-serving CEO of AP2, born in western Dalarna and Gothenburg-educated, who spent a fair chunk of her career in various ministry positions. On the other, Katarina Staaf, the Head of AP6 for the past six years with a broad and diverse CV spanning a range of executive roles within the investment sector. In the middle stands consultant Arkwright’s Mats Langensjö, Sweden’s pension wizard, who has been involved in pretty much every one of the country’s pension reforms ever since the mid-1990s.
Now comes a video leak. Eva Halvarsson has a great reputation as a boss, and is apparently liked at AP2 but all it takes is one indiscrete colleague and what was meant to be an internal meeting is displayed all over the papers. On this recorded work conversation, she calls the merger a “takeover,” hints that the government’s appointed coordinator is “powerless,” and specifies she wouldn’t want this to be mentioned in the media. Days later, journalists at Dagensindustri are also provided with an internal message board conversation in which she reacted to a government review with an angry monkey cartoon. In most countries, this would be meme fodder. In Sweden, it triggered a week of parliamentary hearings.
Finance Committee chair Edward Riedl (Moderate Party) declared the behaviour “inappropriate.” Social Democrat Joakim Sandell called for assurances that AP6’s expertise would survive. The Minister for Financial Markets, Niklas Wykman, was summoned to explain the state of Swedish pension governance.
The scandal is minor, but exquisitely Swedish. A bureaucracy designed to be politics-proof is suddenly convulsed by the politics of tone, trapped in a comedy about emojis, hierarchy, and process.
The American Reality Show
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic… The U.S. political establishment is busy debating whether a president can fire the head of an independent central bank. Markets barely blink. The spectacle is background noise in a country where they talk about political drama the same way Swedes like to mention the weather (and the inevitable impending darkness of winter).
Yet the market’s taste for spectacle is most visible not in politics, but in venture capital. Witness Oklo, the nuclear microreactor start-up backed by Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. It went public through a SPAC earlier this year, trading at valuations that could make Elon Musk jealous. It is currently valued at almost $20 billion (up 500% in just a few months) and yet its power plants exist mostly in renderings and its first permit was denied by U.S. regulators. Investors line up to buy the dream.
The Green Hangover
This brings us to Stegra, the company formerly known as H2 Green Steel, once the poster child of Europe’s green-industrial renaissance. It promised to produce emission-free steel in the northern wilderness of Boden, powered by hydrogen and hope. Its backers read like a Swedish who’s-who: Harald Mix, the private-equity veteran behind Altor and the Vargas group, flanked by institutional capital from the AP funds and the European Investment Bank.
For a while, Stegra was the ultimate European statement piece: capitalism with climate conscience, public money with private-sector flair. But by 2025, costs had ballooned, subsidies lagged, and the company was scrambling to raise nearly a billion euros in new equity. Suddenly, the line between bold industrial policy and overbuilt PowerPoint slides looked distressingly thin.
Mix is a consummate dealmaker, adept at extracting value from operational turnarounds and roll-ups. But innovation is a different art. It’s not about arbitrage or governance; it’s about invention, timing, and risk appetite. Stegra, for all its moral clarity, was never about radical innovation, it was about scaling known technology under benevolent regulation and a somewhat blind faith in the green hype. A fine plan, until the cost of capital changed.
Contrast that with Oklo’s world. Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are as much narrative engineers as they are investors. They live on the speculative frontier, turning futurism into success. Oklo may not have a reactor, but it has a story, a story about energy sovereignty, AI-powered grids, and the mythology of American progress. In that sense, it’s price is almost reasonable.
Europe aims to build things that work; America prices things that might. In Europe, the safeguards and regulatory mechanisms are built to avoid a systemic collapse but slow down innovation into irrelevance while in America, regulation mostly serves as a (temporary) mitigator after the horse has already bolted (sub-prime crisis, anyone?).
The Symmetry of Absurdity
It’s tempting to sneer at both worlds: the Nordic governance fetish and the American hype machine. Together, however, they tell a deeper story about the struggles of late-stage capitalism. Sweden’s system has spent two decades proving that capitalism can be moral if only the committees agree on definitions. America has spent the same decades proving that capitalism can reinvent itself indefinitely if only the story is good enough.
Neither looks particularly brilliant at the moment. Sweden’s industrial transition is bogged down in subsidy arithmetics, while America’s innovation boom is half science, half speculation. But whether Stegra’s smelters decarbonise steel production one day (or go down the Northvolt route), or Oklo’s reactors leave the blueprint stage (our Future Surfer would definitely hope not), there is plenty to be made or lost by those responsible for managing our pensions in the meantime. While AP2 co-invested in both Stegra and Northvolt, AP6, originally set up as the only private equity specialised buffer fund, never invested in either, as Katarina Staaf likes to point out. And yet it is about to see its carefully constructed portfolio liquidated by its larger sister, even though it may result in a lost return opportunity of several billions. Oklo, meanwhile, might soon join the other richly valued stocks that constitute the equity indexes the other pension funds invest in. But if it goes wrong, with access to military grade radioactive substances, we will have to worry about more than our pension returns.
Faith as Capital
So perhaps Sweden’s anxiety is the healthier one. A nation that still flinches at impropriety is a nation still capable of institutional shame, an increasingly scarce commodity in global politics. But restraint has its price: it smothers daring. America, for all its recklessness, still incubates impossible ideas, some of which even work, but at what price?
Stegra and Oklo are not opposites; they are mirror images: one over-governed, the other under-disciplined. Together, they reveal the paradox of our age: we no longer know whether to fear failure or irrelevance more.
Somewhere between Gothenburg’s buffer funds and Silicon Valley’s SPACs, between angry monkeys and atomic unicorns, the future of capitalism teeters on the thin line between diligence and delusion.
