South Korea entered into full-scale election mode late last week, with political parties launching their official campaigns to stretch until the April 10 poll to elect all 300 members of parliament. The election is held as the country struggles to overcome daunting challenges from virtually all fronts at home and abroad. Even before the official campaign period started, major parties and their candidates had already been engaged in various events across the country to meet and directly appeal to

What’s in a name? The final proposals for bank-capital rules were dubbed Basel 3.1, as if to suggest a minor tidying-up exercise – just a few grace notes added to a melody composed long ago. But banks, concerned that the implications would be more severe, spoke of Basel 4, implying not grace notes, but a reworking of the entire composition, now in a major key. That name didn’t stick. Regulators insisted that it was not a new tune, and that anyone who could sing Basel 3 would ha

The United Nations Security Council, the UN’s most important body, is responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. If there is a threat to the peace, the Security Council is supposed to meet, deliberate and adopt measures to curtail aggression and safeguard international law. It’s a weighty responsibility for any country represented on the panel, particularly for the permanent members -- the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China -- most a

Recent drafts of a global pandemic treaty have been widely criticized as “shameful and unjust.” When the latest round of negotiations opened on March 18, it was clear that a key lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic was being ignored: public health and the health of the economy are interdependent. Achieving both requires rewriting the rules of how health and well-being are valued, produced, and distributed -- and how economies are governed. The treaty’s success will depend on member

We are in a world of trouble. Wherever we look these days, all kinds of hell is happening. Or just happened. Or may soon happen. For Gaza’s 2 million-plus Palestinians, things are about as bad as things can get. Yet, a mind-boggling new poll just revealed most Gaza Palestinians are still clueless about who to blame for their misery that has shattered their lives. Also: World leaders appear clueless about what, if anything, they can or should do about it. A half century ago, Israel’s

People say that the future is full of “hopes.” Alexander Pushkin expresses the sentiment well in his celebrated poem, “Should This Life Sometime Deceive You”: “Our heart lives in the future, so/ What if gloom pervades the present?” (Translated by Genia Gurarie). However, foreseeing the ominous dark clouds ahead of us, we can only “hope” to survive the perfect storm awaiting us. For an example of this “perfect storm,” take the recent pre

Under President Joe Biden, the US economy has performed much better than virtually anyone predicted. And yet voters seem not to realize it -- an apparent puzzle that has been much discussed lately. In fact, this disconnect between popular perception and economic performance is nothing new. Since World War II, the US economy has consistently done better during Democratic administrations, yet a large share of Americans -- possibly even a majority -- believe that Republicans are better economic ste

Powerful technology has perhaps never presented a bigger set of regulatory challenges for the US government. Before the state primary in January, Democrats in New Hampshire received robocalls playing AI-generated deepfake audio recordings of President Joe Biden encouraging them not to vote. Imagine political deepfakes that, say, incite Americans to violence. This scenario isn’t too hard to conjure given new research from NYU that describes the distribution of false, hateful or violent

Makgeolli, a milky-colored and lightly carbonated type of Korean rice wine, is a common topic of conversation in our household. Since 2015, my husband, Jeff Rubidge, has been brewing and uploading videos about makgeolli for his YouTube channel. It is a modest drink that only requires three ingredients to brew: rice, nuruk (a Korean fermentation starter) and water. It can be purchased for less than US $2 per bottle in Korea. I have also noticed its role in signaling virtue in K-dramas. Let me exp

The foreign exchange rate is an important price variable not just in the sense that it influences a wide range of economic activities such as exports and imports, but because it is often taken as reflecting the comparative strength of a country’s economic fundamentals against others. It also influences and is influenced by the country’s macroeconomic policies. South Korea is paying especially close attention to the exchange rate movement because it is a very open economy, relying hea