Search Results for: of fools and their money

November 19, 2015

Of fools and their money: Martyn Williams on Orascom’s North Korea fiasco

Martyn Williams of the North Korea Tech blog has a must-read story at IT World about how Orascom’s investment in North Korea’s Koryolink mobile phone service “went horribly wrong.” That such a headline can be written is, by itself, a stunning reversal. During the early years of Kim Jong-Un’s reign, Koryolink was the poster child for more sanguine North Korea watchers, who believed that once a Swiss-educated reformer had taken the throne, a Pyongyang Spring must surely follow. For the...

Categories Engagement/NK Economics
August 31, 2014

Of fools and their money: Volvo sold North Korea 1,000 cars. On credit.

As a tool of economic isolation, North Korea’s business ethics have proven to be far more effective than U.N. sanctions. See also Yang Bin, Senator Robert Torricelli and David Chang, Chung Mong Hun, Nigel Cowie, Roh Jeong-Ho, Albert Yeung Sau Shing and the Emperor Group, the Xiyang Group, and Lloyd’s of London. There’s actually a whole market in North Korea’s defaulted sovereign debt “involving more than 100 banks from 17 countries” dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. And still,...

Categories Engagement
May 1, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Cont.

Will the North Korean money pit sink the Hyundai Group? The financial health of the Hyundai Group began to deteriorate when it started pouring huge amounts of money into its North Korean business in 1998. Hyundai Merchant Marine, the core part of the Hyundai Group accounting for over 80 percent of the group’s total assets, had been supporting Hyundai Asan but was hit badly by the global recession. Last year, it saw sales fall by more than 20 percent from...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
April 10, 2010

Of Fools and Their Money, Pt. 3: Thoughts on the End of Kumgang

North Korea has announced that it will make good on its threat to confiscate the South Korean property at the Kumgang tourist project. In a statement on Thursday, the North’s Guidance Bureau for Comprehensive Development of Scenic Spots, which is in charge of the tourism, said it is seizing a meeting hall for separated families built by the South Korean government, and a cultural hall, a hot spring spa, and a duty-free shop owned by the Korea Tourism Organization, as...

Categories NK Economics/Sunshine
February 19, 2009

Of Fools and Their Money, Part 2: Orascom Deal Starts to Sour

That Orascom’s big new investment in North Korea would fail has always been predictable, but it was always incomprehensible how Orascom’s business model centered around introducing the one thing with the most potential to destabilize the regime’s hold on power: a mobile phone network. Not surprisingly, Orascom and the North Korean regime are already at odds over Orascom’s plan to pass out 100,000 free phones to generate a base of bill-paying subscribers. Instead, the regime is selling them for $235...

Categories NK Economics
December 18, 2008

Of Fools and Their Money

When North Korea first started ejecting South Koreans from Kaesong, I noted that the Kaesong project was already economically marginal and falling well short of its ambitious goals. I also predicted that the North Korean move would be fatal to the project’s efforts to coax cowardly capital into a potential war zone controlled by the world’s most opaque, least capital-friendly regime. That prediction has already come true. The leftist Hankyoreh is reporting that South Korean companies are fleeing for the...

Categories NK Economics
December 11, 2017

Korean War II: A Hypothesis Explained, and a Fisking (Annotated)

(Update, May 2018: A hypothesis should to be tested by its predictive record. I’ve now watched, with growing alarm, how events since the publication of this post have validated it as a predictive model. I’ve recently gone back and embedded footnotes throughout, to indicate which specific predictions have been validated, or not.) In the last several months, as Pyongyang has revealed its progress toward acquiring the capacity to destroy an American city, the North Korea commentariat has cleaved into two...

Categories Fiskings/Korean War II
April 6, 2016

The Panama papers, Pyongyang, and Nigel Cowie

Here at OFK, we keep a running list of gullible foreigners who’ve tried to get rich in North Korea, justified their support for its regime as ways to reform and open it to global commerce, and instead met the same fate as Hyundai Asan, Volvo, Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Roh Jeong-ho, and Orascom’s Naguib Sawaris, who I predicted back in 2008 would “eventually meet the same fate.” Regulators should require securities issuers to disclose their investments in North Korea...

Categories Money Laundering/Sanctions
July 31, 2009

Marcus Noland on Sanctioning North Korea

First, a note of congratulations to Mr. Noland on being named Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute.  Noland also has a paper out on the prospects for disarming North Korea though sanctions.  Here’s a teaser, and I’ll let you read the rest on your own: Given the extremely high priority the North Korean regime places on its military capacity, it is unlikely that the pressure the world can bring to bear on North Korea will be sufficient to induce the...

Categories China & Korea/NK Economics/Sanctions
June 18, 2009

Breaking News: Treasury Issues Money Laundering Alert Against North Korea

This is going to be a big deal.  By the time I have time to update this post, the world financial system will have started purging itself of its links to North Korea.  More later. Update:   Call it Plan B light, and quite possibly a prelude to better things, but this by itself will have a significant effect. Why, you ask?  After all, this alert doesn’t freeze anything.  It’s merely a warning: The U.N. Security Council’s adoption of specific...

Categories Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/NK Economics/Sanctions
June 10, 2009

S. Korea and Japan Join Sanctions Effort Against North Korea

Kyodo News and Yonhap are reporting that we’re close to announcing a deal on sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.  I’m hopeful that the length of the negotiation means that we’ve insisted on something reasonably tough on paper; less so that the Chinese and the Russians will cooperate in practice.  I tend to view claims that China has lost patience with North Korea at last as so much Chinese disinformation, meant to mask China’s premeditated enabling of North Korea’s misdeeds...

Categories "United" Nations/China/Money Laundering/Sanctions
February 11, 2009

Following the Money: The Economic Mysteries of North Korea

On Monday night, I had dinner with a distinguished group that included Andrei Lankov, Chuck Downs, Curtis Melvin, and a friend who covers North Korea for a major news service. Professor Lankov is here to speak at a think tank event and to promote some exciting ideas about getting subversive information into North Korea, which I hope to interview him about later. I asked Professor Lankov about those alarming reports from Good Friends about the food situation last year. With...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics
August 13, 2007

Valor, and The Better Part of It

There are some things that should be too obvious to be missed by nearly everyone, and here is one of them:  the only villains of the Afghan hostage crisis are the Taliban.  It may be human nature to seek out demons, heroes, and martyrs, including phantom ones.  South Korea’s masters of public manipulation have certainly offered the South Korean people a wide choice of villains, and that  choice occasionally even includes the Taliban.  As for heroes, I certainly don’t see...

Categories Uncategorized
May 11, 2010

Kaesong Death Watch

Alternate title: Of fools and their money. North Korea has led a delegation of Chinese investors on a tour of the Kaesong Industrial Complex. Would the North Koreans really confiscate Kaesong as they did Kumgang and hand it over to the Chinese? I sure as hell wish they would. Nothing would please me more than such an ineradicable deterrent to foreign investment, such a thorough repudiation of the Sunshine Policy, and the closure of Kaesong’s money pipe to Pyongyang. Alas,...

Categories China & Korea/NK Economics
December 3, 2018

Of course, Kim Jong-un’s tourist resorts will fail. Of course, we can help with that.

The following question is multiple choice. Please do not use a number two pencil to blacken the oval on your screen. In April, angry, hungry citizens in North Korea’s remote Ryanggang Province took the brave and desperate step of protesting to local authorities over forced “donations” of food, money, and supplies they were required to make to the construction of — (a) an orphanage (b) a grain elevator (c) a soy-based infant formula factory (d) a beach resort If you...

Categories Human Trafficking/Sanctions/Sunshine/U.S. Law
November 19, 2018

How engaging the wrong North Koreans set back openness, reform & peace

South Korea’s social-nationalist government, joined by too many Western academics of the sort who bask in its generosity and fear the withdrawal of it, has re-embraced the “Sunshine” hypothesis. This hypothesis equates nearly all economic “engagement” with North Korea’s military-industrial complex — also known as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” — with economic openness, and economic openness with political openness, disarmament, prosperity, and peace. The Western exemplar of no-questions-asked engagement is the NGO and media darling known as Choson...

Categories North-South/Sunshine
November 1, 2018

Moon Jae-in chases Kim Jong-un while South Korea’s economy burns

Just over a year ago, Bloomberg Opinion published an op-ed under the title, “Can South Korea Save Liberalism?” It purred that Moon Jae-in was “charting an entirely contrary course in economic policy than much of the rest of the developed world” that was “unapologetically … dependent on the kind of taxing and spending conservatives loathe.” “If successful,” it hypothesized, “the experiment could alter how governments tackle the most challenging problems of our day.” As recently as June, The Diplomat published...

Categories South Korea
July 26, 2018

Kaesong is a buffalo jump for amoral politicians & unlawyered cretins

Mark Lambert, who is a “U.S. State Department official in charge of Korean affairs,” and who is also a mensch, is in South Korea this week, where he will meet with Korean officials, and also with “a group of South Korean businesspeople involved in inter-Korean economic projects.” Over the course of 15 years, this blog has followed the various get-broke-quick buffalo jumps that promoters, most of them amoral politicians who specialize in throwing away other people’s money, euphemistically call “inter-Korean...

Categories Kaesong/Sunshine