South Korea’s foreign investment has dropped by nearly 90%, raising concerns despite a surplus in the current account. October 2024 data from the Bank of Korea.
Let’s move on to South Korea’s balance of payments statistics. The Bank of Korea has released data as of October 2024, and it’s quite interesting. I introduced the current account balance earlier, but as I mentioned in the previous article, the current account balance is not very interesting. The South Korean media will probably just say, “Yay! The current account balance is a surplus of about 9.78 billion yen,” but is this really the time to be saying such things? ・Foreign investment has fallen by almost 90%! First, let’s look at “direct investment” in the financial balance. Below are the results for this month’s direct investment “asset section.” This asset section records the amount of direct investment made by South Korea abroad*. *To be precise, this shows how much “assets abroad” have increased through investments from South Korea abroad. However, as shown above, in October the total was only $282.4 million. Frankly, this is an extraordinary number. In May 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the economy hard, the figure fell below $100 million to $41.6 million, a truly shocking figure, but since then, things have been abnormal. In March 2020, a global dollar shortage occurred, and South Korea was on the verge of being hit. Please remember that in March, the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) suddenly concluded a dollar liquidity swap (called a currency swap on the Korean side) and somehow managed to save the country. The graph below shows the trend in “Financial balance/direct investment ⇒ Asset section” in 2024. You can see how low the “$282.4 million” for October 2024 is and how it is an outlier. Compared to the previous month, September, the result is “approximately -88.6%.” In fact, South Korea’s foreign direct investment fell by almost 90%. What I want to know is, “Do you guys happen to not have any money?” ・Securities investments have also plummeted!
・In October, foreign countries withdrew $7.66 billion from Korea! This month, “money lent by Korea to foreign countries: assets” was $7,096 million. “They provided loans,” but that aside, the “money lent by foreign countries to South Korea: debt” is a whopping “-7,661,500,000 dollars.” This means that foreign countries have withdrawn the $7.66 billion they lent to South Korea (thus reducing foreign assets = liabilities for South Korea). That’s a total of $7.6615 billion, which is a huge amount for South Korea. That’s why I can’t help but ask, “Do you guys not have any money?” (Yoshida Hunting @dcp) Full text from the source 2024.12.08 ※Related thread [JoongAng Ilbo] Despite a series of downgrades to growth forecasts for next year… The uncertainty crisis that hit the Korean economy [12/8] [Insect Encyclopedia★].
>Japan is rich, so it should not be stingy and should help Korea. If it helps Korea, it should not get involved with people who hold grudges against it.
>>44 That’s because Japan acted too slowly. If they had acted sooner, Korea would have been better served. Japan only started to help Korea after it was exhausted.
We have ample foreign exchange reserves so we’ll be fine. If there’s an economic crisis, we can use those. If the numbers are fake, then do your best to fix it yourself.
> They repaid Japan with the Korean wave. It was a cold current in which Koreans tried to gain the upper hand, but it ended up being nothing more than an imposition of their Korean slogan, and it only deepened their dislike.
>That’s because Japan acted too slowly. >If they had acted sooner, Korea would have been better served. >Japan started to provide aid only after Korea was exhausted. Next time, they should just leave them alone and let them crawl on the ground and lick the mud.
>>53 >I won’t help you this time, so don’t worry, let them go bankrupt. Both the US and the IMF have already approved it. If we help South Korea, the vulture funds won’t be able to make money, so the US business community will be angry, so I’m tired of being hated for helping them.
>>57 > Now I can blame anything on Yoon so I’m relieved lol No, that’s really it. Koreans do not understand that the current deterioration of the Korean economy is due to Moon’s policies that caused the real estate market to skyrocket and wage increases that catered to labor unions but were not backed by economic growth. They are criticizing Yoon for pandering to Japan, but if he returns to Moon’s diplomatic line, he will be left out in the cold and Trump will tell him, “You go and dry out there.”
Comments