City Life

20 June 2009

Morning calm in financial markets despite mad Kim’s nuclear endgame

I feel like Forrest Gump, a barometer of Asian Armageddon. I’ve come to South Korea via Sri Lanka, where the triumphant Rajapakse brothers were parading the bullet-ridden body of Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran on state television to the tune of Star Wars. And now that I’m comfortably billeted in Seoul’s Hotel Shilla, preferred hostelry of Korea’s old-monied corporate clans, local media report that the former president Roh Moo-hyun has just killed himself and mad Kim up north is threatening to irradiate us all in an insane endgame of nuclear brinkmanship. Have I dodged suicide bombers in Sri Lanka only to meet my maker in the last episode of the Cold War?

I’m here to see how they’re dealing with the GEC — that’s global economic crisis. Just fine, as it happens, but another alarming acronym has Korea-watchers a-twitter: ICBMs, the ones Kim Jong-il is pointing across the troubled peninsula and beyond, to Japan and the US. Desperate Kim behaves like a baby throwing toys out of his pram, and the rest of us placate him by throwing money — until the next tantrum, and the one after that. The threats are more serious this time but South Koreans seem to be reacting with admirable sanguinity. Stock and currency markets briefly tottered, commuters grabbed the news on smartphones en route to the office, but they woke the next day to discover that they were all still here, and capitalism proceeded apace.

As for the financial crisis, the Land of Morning Calm is reacting with, well, morning calm. ‘We wake up and get the bad news from New York and London but it’s OK, we had our big crisis in 1998,’ explains HSBC’s Changsoo Lee, ‘so we’ve been well prepared for this one.’ Indeed, remarkably for an export-driven economy — witness the Samsung and LG gadgets and Hyundai and Kia cars in almost everyone’s households everywhere — South Korea is yet to slip into recession, which is more than Japan, Singapore and Taiwan can boast.

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