[Clara Ferreira Marques] 'Korean Beatles' can’t buy stock market’s love

Shares of Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind South Korean boy band BTS, begin trading this week. A top-of-the-range IPO valuation of $4.2 billion implies rock-star earnings multiples. Institutional investors have piled in anyway, displaying impressive confidence in the staying power of ultra-groomed youths and their obsessive followers. To live up to the hype, billionaire founder Bang Si-hyuk needs to turn a one-band wonder into something closer to Universal Music Group, adding artists a

Oct. 14, 2020

[Hal Brands] Little war in Caucasus has big lessons for US and Russia

Small wars can tell you a lot about the biggest geopolitical and military issues of the day. Consider the present conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Most Americans have probably never heard of that disputed region in the Caucasus. But the fighting there reveals key fault lines in an increasingly disordered global environment, and it underscores crucial trends in the evolution of modern warfare. In some ways, there is nothing new about what is happening in Nagorno-Ka

Oct. 13, 2020

[Mac Margolis] Bolsonaro’s COVID cash could make Brazil go bust

Latin America responded ambitiously, if not always efficiently, to the coronavirus pandemic, with many countries spreading cash, credit and tax deferrals to vulnerable companies and households. The emergency stimulus has injected bountiful resources into listing economies -- 12 percent of gross domestic product for Peru, 18 percent in Brazil, 5 percent in Argentina -- and helped those who were already struggling as well as 45 million more at risk of falling back into poverty. It has reduced job

Oct. 12, 2020

[Francis Wilkinson] Republicans have no plan for the future

When the coherent half of the Republican ticket participated in the vice presidential debate in the US this week, it was an opportunity for viewers to learn what the future holds. Yes, Vice President Mike Pence may be a talking-point machine, but to a debate audience that’s a more useful device than a random-lie generator. You can learn things from talking points. There’s only one problem: Republicans have no points to talk about. If elections are about the future, the GOP plans ar

Oct. 12, 2020

[Digital Simplicity] Crossing the fine line between originality and plagiarism

Genshin Impact, a free-to-play action role-playing game, is evoking a slew of intriguing questions involving plagiarism in game development and the protection of user data. Since the Sept. 28 global release, Genshin Impact has quickly gained a sizable user base in South Korea, thanks to its cute anime characters as well as the beautifully rendered backgrounds and intricate battle system. The game, developed and published by China-based miHoYo, is available on mobile phones, PC and the Play

Oct. 9, 2020

[Robert J. Fouser] Hangeul Day beyond South Korea

Today, Oct. 9, is Hangeul Day, a national holiday in South Korea that honors Korea’s unique writing system. Hangeul Day was celebrated as a national holiday from 1949 to 1990 and again from 2013 to the present. From 1991 to 2012, Hangeul Day was a day of commemoration, but not a national holiday. The 23-year gap says much about Korea in the late 1980s and 2010s. The late 1980s are known most for the democratization and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. The dictatorial government of Chun Doo-h

Oct. 9, 2020

[Kim Myong-sik] Virus of deceit infects both government, governed

Disease control authorities complain that their fight against the coronavirus is most seriously disrupted when people conceal their contact with the sources of infection. These cheaters want to avoid the trouble of a two-week quarantine because they need to continue to work and earn a living. About a quarter of total infections cannot be traced to their origins. In the early days of the pandemic in this country, members of a heavily infected Christian sect in Daegu were blamed for failing to r

Oct. 8, 2020

[Jeffrey D. Sachs] The lies that infected Trump

Unlike tens of millions of people around the world who have contracted COVID-19 because of their poverty, bad luck, vulnerability as essential workers or poor decisions by policymakers, US President Donald Trump’s infection is of his own making. Trump’s disdain for science and his brazen disregard for public-health advice led directly to his own illness; far worse, they have fueled America’s soaring COVID-19 death toll -- now at more than 214,000. Since the pandemic began, pub

Oct. 8, 2020

[Mohamed A. El-Erian] Trump illness exposes underlying market tension

Losses in the main US stock indexes on Friday will go down in history simply as small ones in an otherwise choppy week. But assessed in more detail, they provide a remarkable example of the intense tug-of-war that now grips markets and will most likely persist, if not intensify, in the weeks ahead. Two news developments dominated the runup to the US market opening Friday. First and foremost was the middle-of-the-night tweet from President Donald Trump confirming that he and his wife had tested

Oct. 7, 2020

[Kim Seong-kon] Things that make us ashamed these days

Shame, though painful or unpleasant, is an integral virtue of human beings. Human decency and integrity stem from a sense of shame. If we are shameless and brazen, we are no longer human and reduced to animal-like creatures. In fact, the spectacle of shameless people makes us feel ashamed on their behalf. Unfortunately, we encounter so many unabashed people and things that make us feel ashamed these days. Recently, we were appalled at North Korea’s brutal shooting and presumed burning of

Oct. 7, 2020

[Elizabeth Drew] Is US facing next civil war?

America’s capital is more on edge now than at perhaps any other time since the eve of the US Civil War in 1860. The city was tense during Watergate, of course. But as much as Richard Nixon tested the constitutional system as a lawyer who had served in government for decades, he recognized that there are limits that even a president dares not transgress. And now, with President Donald Trump, the first lady and a top aide among those testing positive for COVID-19, there is more uncertainty i

Oct. 6, 2020

[Therese Raphael] Johnson's case has echoes for Trump

When Boris Johnson announced on March 27 that he’d tested positive for COVID-19, Brits were in shock, much as Americans were Friday morning when they heard President Donald Trump was infected. The UK prime minister was the first leader of a major country to be hospitalized with the virus, an event that was characterized as “routine” at first before the illness took a more serious turn. Nobody knows how this will play out for Trump, just as they didn’t for Johnson. But th

Oct. 6, 2020

Belief in mission vital to entrepreneurs

The world as we know it has changed. I have lived through three different crises in my life. The first one was the Indonesian political turmoil in 1998 that coincided with the Asian financial crisis, and the second is when I graduated from college in the United States. Having graduated with an electrical engineering degree, I faced a job market reeling from the burst of the dot-com bubble. Even though I was lucky enough to find a job in Boston, the highlight of my second day of work was 9/11. T

Oct. 5, 2020

[Andreas Kluth] Europe can have stimulus or rule of law, not both

More by carelessness than design, the European Union has conflated two of its biggest problems into what last week became one hot mess. To get out of it, the bloc may have to make the Brussels equivalent of Sophie’s choice: It could sacrifice the principle that all member states must respect the rule of law. Or it could ditch its plans for economic recovery and fiscal cohesion. This trap was laid in July. Under the moderation of Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency, the 27 nati

Oct. 5, 2020

[Lee Kyong-hee] A land developer’s passion for Korean script

Tourists flock to Bukchon Hanok Village, perpetuating the must-see reputation of the Seoul enclave. The small Korean-style houses lining narrow alleyways are cultural magnets, pulling in sightseers from home and abroad. Many of the residents don traditional Korean garb to perhaps recapture the backdrops of popular serials and movies shot in the neighborhood. This, of course, was before the COVID-19 pandemic froze travel and tourism. The tourist boom in Bukchon began with the first ripples of H

Sept. 30, 2020

[Kim Seong-kon] Learning from inspirational phrases on internet or in films

Recently on the internet, I came across a rather penetrating passage that says, “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.” At first, I thought a conservative American wrote it to warn the American people of the pervasiveness of socialism. To my surprise, the author was a renowned 19th centur

Sept. 30, 2020

[Tyler Cowen] Will pandemic normal become normal?

One feature of the COVID-19 era is how much the standard ways of seeing and doing things have been remixed and turned upside down. The obvious question is then whether people will decide to make these new arrangements permanent or return to the old. For example: I used to enjoy going to nouvelle-style slightly fancy restaurants, ordering 10 appetizers (and no main courses) and sharing them with a table of four. Many of those appetizers were composed of disparate ingredients, carefully placed on

Sept. 30, 2020

[Andreas Kluth] If we can’t ban nukes, let’s stigmatize them

There are potential catastrophes so dire, only an approach that blurs the realist and the utopian seems appropriate. Take for example the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Adopted by the United Nations in 2017, it seeks to completely get rid of the most satanic arms ever created. The treaty’s already been signed by 84 states and ratified by 45. To take effect -- that is, to be binding on its signatories -- it needs only another handful of ratifications. And last week a group

Sept. 29, 2020

[Trudy Rubin] Trump’s ‘big lie’ echoes autocrats

In the 1920s Adolf Hitler coined the term “the big lie,” meaning the use of falsehood so huge no one would believe a leader could dare promote it were it not true. From then on the phrase “the big lie” became a standard description of the prime propaganda technique used by strongmen in undemocratic regimes. Last week, Donald Trump’s mastery of the big lie was on full display when he gave himself an A+ for his handling of COVID-19. “We’ve done a phenom

Sept. 29, 2020

[Ana Palacio] The EU merry-go-round

In her first State of the European Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered a wide-ranging view of the current moment. She touted Europe’s recent achievements and identified its goals for the coming years. She dedicated significant attention to the European Green Deal and the Digital Agenda, and called for the completion of the banking union and capital-market integration. In normal times, it would have been a solid, if not particularly inspiring, performan

Sept. 28, 2020