(Bloomberg) -- A more divided world is posing geopolitical challenges for markets that Norway’s $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth hasn’t previously witnessed, Chief Executive Officer Nicolai Tangen said. 

“The fund has gone through a dot-com boom, a financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, all of which created great turmoil in the markets, but we’ve never seen a longer and more persistent downturn,” Tangen said at a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday. “We must be prepared for such an eventuality.”

The wealth fund, which owns about 1.5% of listed stocks globally, has never experienced such a shift of the environment in which it operates, Tangen said. The growing weight of the world’s seven biggest technology companies - including Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. - is also driving a “concentration risk unlike any we’ve seen before,” the executive said.

Read More: Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Boosted Tech Stock Holdings

Created in the 1990s to invest Norway’s oil and gas revenues abroad, the fund — also known as Norges Bank Investment Management — largely tracks a benchmark index based on a framework handed down by parliament. As a result, tech companies now account for eight out of ten of the fund’s top holdings.

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