South Korea’s rapidly climbing household debt is a key factor hampering the nation’s growth potential.Its significance is evident when we compare the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product and collective household debt in the first quarter. While GDP inched up 2.7 percent on-year during the first three months, the nation’s household debt surged 11.4 percent on-year, or 125.5 trillion won ($106 billion), to reach 1.223 quadrillion won.Korea’s household debt is fast approaching its annual G

Editorial May 27, 2016

The leftists who came of age in the counterculture revolutionary movements of the ’60s and ’70s are now in charge in both Europe and the U.S., and facing a populist backlash. They failed to learn the lessons of their own experiences, and it’s time for them to be dropkicked into the waste bin of history.In the wake of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was a massive movement in Western nations against anything that smacked of authority. At first it was more social than political.I

Viewpoints May 27, 2016

Democrats hoped this presidential election would be a cakewalk. In their eyes, the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, spent most of the spring alienating big chunks of the electorate, beginning with women. Meanwhile, the presumptive Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, has run a careful, well-funded, well-honed campaign. What could go wrong?And yet, in a spate of reputable surveys Trump has suddenly erased the advantage Clinton had held all year. The average of major polls compiled

Viewpoints May 27, 2016

As anticipated, the case involving cosmetics firm Nature Republic’s CEO Jung Woon-ho is growing into a major corruption scandal that threatens to implicate incumbent prosecutors and judges.At the center of the case are allegations that Jung attempted -- through the help of lawyers and middle men -- to buy the influence of prosecutors and judges to get a lighter punishment for his illegal gambling charges.The scandal has already put a senior-judge-turned-lawyer into custody and forced a senior ju

Editorial May 13, 2016

U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima later this month will have many implications for the world and South Korea as well.Most of all, the first visit by the incumbent U.S. leader to the place where it dropped an atomic bomb 71 years ago should reawaken the world to the need to get rid of the most menacing weapon of destruction ever made by mankind.In fact, Obama has tried to build nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation as a key legacy of his presidency. He kicked off his denucleariz

Editorial May 13, 2016

Which country has the highest percentage of its Muslim population fighting for the Islamic State group as foreign recruits? Algeria? Afghanistan? Indonesia? Nope.Try Finland. No. 2 is Ireland, followed by Belgium, Sweden and Austria.What do these countries have in common, besides being European? They’re wealthy, democratic and have high levels of education, health and income. They also have very low levels of economic inequality.These findings appear in an eyebrow-raising report by the National

Viewpoints May 13, 2016

Chinese markets have rarely looked more like Vegas casinos. In recent weeks, investors have driven up trading volumes in China to astronomical levels, betting on everything from rebar to eggs. China traded enough steel in one day last month to build 178,082 Eiffel Towers and enough cotton to make at least one pair of jeans for every person on the planet.These commodity markets aren’t gyrating purely because Chinese are inveterate gamblers. Government policies have made China especially prone to

Viewpoints May 9, 2016

Americans may need to bring in the kids; the presidential election promises to get ugly, a race to the bottom.Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both arouse strong passions, many of them negative. Both play tough.She is a policy wonk, but Trump has little interest in a wide-ranging debate on issues. In the Republican primaries, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz all tried at times to challenge him on substance; he brushed them aside with pointed personal rejoinders. It worked remarkably well.But a

Viewpoints May 9, 2016

Pyongyang’s version of YouTube recently featured a computer-animated clip of a nuclear strike on Washington delivered via a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile. The North, which a decade ago tested its first nuclear weapon, will soon cross another threshold that could make its video propaganda a genuine threat: It will be able to attack the U.S. homeland with nuclear-tipped long-range ballistic missiles.North Korea’s potential nuclear breakout is both quantitative and qualitative. Un

Viewpoints May 9, 2016

Here’s a big economic and political thesis: The U.S. has run out of frontiers, both literal and figurative. 　At first, growth was fueled by expansion into the West, use of natural resources and the build-out of national infrastructure. In the early- and mid-20th century, an unprecedented explosion of new technologies -- electricity, automobiles, airplanes and others -- opened up the suburbs, which acted like a new frontier. More recently, the Internet and globalization, especially China, were fr

Viewpoints May 8, 2016

There are more than 10,000 private hospitals in China, and their numbers -- and revenues -- are growing every year. Yet they’re also among the least trusted institutions in China, widely assumed to be dens of quackery, malpractice and shameless profiteering.So why do patients flock to them? One reason is that China’s top search engine, Baidu, accepts their advertising.That’s how Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old cancer patient, ended up spending more than $30,000 on what was advertised as an experimental

Viewpoints May 8, 2016

Pope Francis has called corruption “the gangrene of a people.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has labeled it a “radicalizer,” because it “destroys faith in legitimate authority.” And British Prime Minister David Cameron has described it as “one of the greatest enemies of progress in our time.”Corruption, put simply, is the abuse of public office for personal gain. As leaders increasingly recognize, it is a menace to development, human dignity, and global security. At the anticorruption summi

Viewpoints May 8, 2016