Case-study of why you shouldn’t consume lots of it or j-e-l-l-o:
10/28/2008
The pudding got to his head
The Golden Goose
If you’re interested in seeing just how passionate Korean’s are towards getting ahead in English-speaking, here is one of the more somber stories: Goose Dads Feel Pinch
Also, a bunch of people have asked me about an update regarding Korea’s tanking economy.
Despite the huge rebound today, it will probably continue to drop for many moons.
I hate to be the cynic, but the primary reason for why there was a huge jump in the market was the National Pension Service, the largest investor in Korea, bought what they consider “undervalued” assets.
Unfortunately for them, nothing fundamentally changed in the companies they bought. Earnings will continue to slump and profit will continue to falter well into next year. I would be upset if I was on a fixed income, dependent on my monthly stipend from the NPS.
While some of these could be arguably undervalued (like POSCO) in the long-run, many of them are crap (like banks/financials).
You know how the Fed helped bankroll the JP Morgan/Bear Stearn’s take over in March? Well, the Fed just lost $2.2 billion in write-downs (actually the US taxpayer took the hit), because the assets were crap. The same thing is happening here in Korea. In fact, the government is spending part of its $130 billion “bailout” package physically buying commercial real-estate to prop up property prices and pumping cash into construction firms.
In the next couple of years, this will all still have to be written down because the real estate market here was fanatically overbuilt and a lot of it was funded with borrowed money that cannot be repaid.
So, to get back to the results in the market today, the NPS is taking a huge gamble and I think it was definitely a bad decision in the short run and probably a really bad decision in the long-run. Remember, if you invested in the Dow in the summer of 1929 it took the rest of your adult life until you saw the values return to pre-crash levels. With the Kospi down more than 50% since it peaked last year, this is a huge gamble that might not even pay out, period.
See also: So that’s why they’re screwed?
Will this be as low as it goes?