Asia

Well-functioning capital markets should encourage private saving and investment by channeling surplus funds to reach their most productive uses. In the process, well-functioning capital markets create a diverse menu of…

During the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign, “Deep Throat,” later revealed to be Associate Director Mark Felt of the FBI, counseled Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to “follow…

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Korean government geared up to carry out financial restructuring. As a result, the number of domestic financial institutions stood at almost half…

Korea’s money market includes the call market as well as markets for monetary stabilization bonds (MSBs), negotiable certifi cates of deposit (CDs), repurchase agreements (repos), commercial paper (CP), and cover…

June 25, 2020 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. The conflict on the Korean Peninsula has been going on for so long that we sometimes…

2020 is starting off dramatically with the escalation of tensions in the Middle East – The world held its breath while the United States and Iran exchanged both blows and…

While it is frustrating to see North Korean projectiles flying out to sea and Pyongyang’s erratic, unpredictable reactions in negotiations, we cannot forget where things stood in 2017 – the…

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people’s aspiration to establish a pluralistic liberal democracy appears to be under scrutiny around the world – anti-immigration policies dominate political…

In the last two posts on Korea and the war in Ukraine, I showed that Moon administration moved relatively quickly to join the international sanctions regime and was rewarded by inclusion on Russia’s  "unfriendly nations" list. I also argued that the costs of standing on international legal principle were softened by the fact that the…

The OECD Economic Outlook, released on June 8th, projected that real GDP growth in OECD countries would drop by half from 5.5% in 2021 to 2.7% in 2022. The new projection is a sharp reduction from its December 2021 Outlook, which projected growth of 4.5% growth this year. With inflation expected to rise from 3.7%…

Over the last half decade, the Korean Peninsula has seen the prospect of war during Donald Trump’s period of “fire and fury,” but also a period of negotiations that resulted in a series of North-South and U.S.-North Korea summits. While war was avoided, those efforts at negotiation ultimately failed. The aftermath of those failed negotiations,…

After more than two years since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 has finally been detected in North Korea. Despite strict border controls limiting the movement of people and goods to prevent entry of the novel coronavirus, state media reported on 12 May that the Omicron BA.2 variant had been found in a sample taken…