Bài đăng

Is a global financial crisis about to happen? It sure looks like it! 1/ Storage keeps crashing, and the South Korean stock market keeps hitting circuit breakers. Many people treat it as a joke, thinking it's just because of high local leverage in South Korea. But if you review the past thirty years of global financial crises, you'll find a pattern: South Korea is always the first to fall in every major crisis. 2/ Before the four circuit breakers in the 2020 pandemic stock crash, the South Korean KOSPI had already dropped 35% three weeks earlier. Two months before Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in 2008, South Korea was already facing a dollar shortage. Before the 2000 Nasdaq crash, Samsung and Hynix had already revised down their forecasts, and South Korea's semiconductor sector peaked early. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea was the first core economy to be breached. 3/ This is no coincidence. South Korea's capital market is almost fully open, with foreign ownership consistently over 30%. Samsung and Hynix are among the most liquid assets globally. Capital flows freely in and out, with ample support for large sales to be executed quickly. 4/ Therefore, South Korea has become a "backup cash pool" for global capital. Western institutions earn yields in South Korea during normal times, but when domestic liquidity tightens, margin calls come, or debts mature, their first reaction is to sell overseas holdings and pull money back home to put out fires. 5/ The priority is clear: protect the home market first, then abandon the periphery; sell the most liquid assets first, then move to harder-to-liquidate ones. This has little to do with South Korea's economic health or whether its stock market is in a bubble—it's purely capital's instinct for self-preservation. Let's encourage each other, brothers!