As the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank prepare for their annual meeting next week, all eyes are on Evergrande, China’s second-largest property developer, which apparently cannot repay about $300 billion it currently owes to banks, bondholders, employees, and suppliers. With the property giant teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the world is being forced to contemplate a scenario it had never seriously considered: a made-in-China financial crisis. Observers have been quick

Although they often miss their youth, old people are wise enough to know that they cannot get any younger. For some inscrutable reason, however, some young people seem to forget they will grow old someday. They naively think that they will be young forever. Perhaps that is why they unabashedly make fun of elderly people, or have even gone so far as to insult them in public by calling them various derogatory names, such as “old bat,” “old-timer,” or “kkondae”

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. European politicians are scrambling to pin the blame for a painful surge in wholesale energy prices on reliable punching bags -- the shift to cleaner power sources, the price of carbon, greedy utilities -- while conveniently missing the bigger picture of dependency on Russian gas and internal battles over what should count as “clean.” France is using the opportunity to spread the gospel of nuclear power, which produces no greenhou

“Those of us who conduct foreign policy haven’t always done a good job connecting it to the needs and aspirations of the American people,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his first major speech. President Joe Biden’s administration, he said, seeks to change that and is calling this approach a “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class.” According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ new survey on American Attitudes toward US foreign policy, the

“Hate the game developer, not the game.” This slightly tweaked version of the timeless maxim applies to the two well-known massively multiplayer online role-playing games: Lineage and Diablo 2. Both have been touted as the undisputed pioneering games that set the stage for the rapid growth of the MMORPG genre in the past decades. Lineage, released by NCSoft in September 1998, reshaped the Korean gaming scene; Diablo 2, put out by Blizzard Entertainment in June 2000, was a landmark P

Articles on the housing market in the South Korean media are frequent and focus entirely on two topics: cost and scandal. Cost concerns the steady rise in prices, both for buying and renting. Scandal concerns the various tactics that the rich and powerful use to profit from real estate. The thread running through the media’s interest in cost and scandal is that owning a home is critical to building and accumulating wealth. Since taking office in May 2017, the Moon Jae-in administration ha

If you want to know why nearly 40 million leaked documents on the salting away of assets in offshore financial centers have failed to result in comprehensive change since the revelations started eight years ago, Billie Holiday provides a clue: “Them that‘s got shall get; them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible said, and it still is news.” The latest set of leaks to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is the largest yet. After sifting the data, medi

Many South Koreans, under continuing duress from the COVID-19 pandemic, have an additional cause for discomfort these days: a housing development scam unfolding in a satellite city of Seoul where a handful of unknown people made undeserved profits of an astronomical scale. Their adrenaline goes up when they imagine the possible involvement of Lee Jae-myung, the ruling party’s presidential election front-runner, in this affair in his political hometown. The Daejang-dong project in Seongnam

Recently, the Korean television series “Squid Game” has become the top-rated program on Netflix in many countries, including Korea. “Squid Game” tells the story of 456 desperate and down-and-out men and women who decide to go through a cutthroat survival game for an astronomical prize: 45.6 billion won, which is about $38.4 million. The problem is that only the final survivor can get the prize money, while all of the others must die along the way. Behind the game, a sin

Is the specter of communism haunting Russia again? Not since the election of 1996, the only post-Soviet presidential race in Russia to result in a runoff, has the country’s Communist Party seemed like a real threat. In more than two decades since Vladimir Putin first took the helm, it has played the role of pliant opposition, helping the Kremlin to maintain a facade of democratic choice. The future looks less predictable. Gennady Zyuganov, the 77-year-old former Soviet ideologue who unsuc

From the Huawei affair to the AUKUS spat and beyond, a new reality is shaking up the global economy: the takeover, usually hostile, of international economics by geopolitics. This process is probably only just beginning, and the challenge now is learning how to live with it. Of course, economics and geopolitics have never been completely separate domains. The post-World War II liberal economic order was designed by economists, but on the basis of a master plan conceived by foreign-policy strat

If you are concerned about the well-being of the United States and interested in what the country could do to help itself, stop what you are doing and read historian Geoffrey Kabaservice’s superb 2012 book, “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.” To understand why, allow me a brief historical interlude. Until roughly the start of the 17th century, people generally had to look back in time to fi

Teaching as a profession holds a special place in the modern Korean history of rapid economic and social development. During the 1950s and 60s, many young elites of diverse backgrounds and talents joined the patriotic call to teach in public schools across the country. During the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953), which wreaked havoc on the economy and infrastructure, the Korean government used public school teachers as a human resource to rebuild the country’s education system and e

Recently released Census Bureau data show that more than 37 million people in America lived at or below the federal poverty line in 2020. That’s 11.4 percent of the population, and a full percentage point higher than what it was in 2019. But the federal poverty line doesn’t begin to tell the story of poverty in the US. Half of US families struggle to make ends meet. They are part of what I call the “uncounted majority,” people who have trouble paying basic bills even th

President Joe Biden hosted a summit Friday that could turn out to be a watershed -- but if you weren’t watching, you might have missed it. The meeting brought together the leaders of a deliberately low-key group called “the Quad”: the United States, Japan, India and Australia. US officials downplayed the session, describing it as “an informal gathering of leading democracies in the Indo-Pacific.” China wasn’t fooled. Its diplomats have spent months denounci