Category — North Korea

As a part of its 18-month long inquiry into the causes of the financial crisis, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee on Tuesday summoned Lloyd Blainkfein and several other senior Goldman executives to answer for their role in causing the financial crisis.

According to the subcommittee, it has [Read more →]

A saying goes that “acceptable unemployment is defined as the level at which the Government economist writing the report still has a job.” Certainly, it can be argued that in most countries, economists tend to be quite insulated from the consequences of the policies they propose. Apparently, this is not the case in North Korea. After a major currency reform last year failed completely, the high-level economist Pak Nam Gi, former finance director for the North Korean “Worker’s Party”, was convicted of treason for “ruining the national economy as the son of a big landlord who infiltrated the ranks of revolutionaries” and executed by firing squad.

The policy environment leading the execution of the North Korean economist, who was most likely a scapegoat, is hardly one that should be emulated. However, I can’t help but think about how the U.S. or Europe might have looked in the wake of the financial crisis if a more North Korean approach had been taken during the witch-hunt that followed it (and is still ongoing).  Could you charge Richard Fuld with treason for over-leveraging, or Eugene Fama for trying to make people think that capital markets are efficient?. Certainly one would expect the emergence of a slightly more risk-averse financial sector.

For a more realistic discussion about discretionary power being given to regulators, check out The Epicurean Dealmaker’s recent post about fire alarms, strong men, and big axes.

Thanks goes to loyal Evolution-Revolution reader and good friend Jan Petter Janssen, creator of Developing Trader, for the tip about Pak Nam Gi.

I just came across a post at the North Korea Economy Watch blog linking to North Korean comic book translations made by Heinz Insu Fenkl, an associate professor in the department of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz . As such, I have spent the last couple of hours or so reading about the Great General Mighty Wing and the Kim Brothers in Blizzard in The Jungle. It is easy for those of us who grew up after the end of the cold war to think of authoritarian dictatorships and ultra-explicit propaganda as relics of the distant past. These North Korean comics sadly remind us that this is not the case. They are, however, [Read more →]

Der Spiegel has a very interesting article on three Swedish guys who have started their own jeans brand, Noko Jeans. Noko has chosen a quite unusual country for the manufacturing of its jeans: North Korea. Apparently the People’s Republic has its own web site where it offers opportunities for foreign investors. Maybe we are actually seeing the first few steps of a softening up of North Korea and its eventual emergence as a part-taker in the global community.

For Noko the deal was closed in the same way as most early investors in China did it. Heavy drinking and socialization with the locals to build trust and making a deal with a conglomerate that really seems to make everything. They couldn’t get all that they wanted though; the jeans had to be black since blue denim jeans were considered too much of an American symbol. Some old habits die hard after all.