Search Results for: confiscation riot

May 24, 2010

Overthrowing Kim: A Capitalist Manifesto

[Originally published at The New Ledger, May 2010; edited for brevity in October 2017] Within the next 48 hours, South Korea is expected to announce that North Korea torpedoed and sank the warship Cheonan and killed 46 of her crew. Among the evidence the multinational investigation will cite will be the North Korean serial number on the torpedo’s propeller, recovered from the ocean floor. The sinking of the Cheonan may be the most serious North Korean provocation since 1968 —...

Categories Capitalism/Regime Change
February 2, 2010

Daily NK: Angry North Koreans Attacking, Killing Secret Police

The Daily NK is reporting on “an explosion in the number of casualties resulting from popular resentment” of the series of draconian economic diktats I call The Great Confiscation. These include the cancellation and reissue of the currency, which wiped out the savings of millions of people overnight; the ban on foreign currency; and the closure of markets — first in Pyongyang, and if rumors are accurate, in Chongjin and Hamhung this spring. Via Curtis, we have North Korean confirmation...

Categories Resistance
January 7, 2010

North Korea Descending Into Economic Chaos

I’ve long believed that functionally, there were two North Korean economies — a mostly capitalist (and to the U.N., illicit) “palace” economy that funds Kim Jong Il’s regime, and an increasingly capitalist (and to Kim Jong Il, illicit) “peoples’ economy” that rose from the ashes of the failed Public Distribution System. Some say that international food aid ended the Great Famine, a famine that may have killed millions of North Koreans. There is some truth in this, but international food...

Categories NK Economics/Uncategorized
December 18, 2009

Kim Jong Il’s Trickle-Up Economics Starve North Korea’s Poor

After the Great Confiscation was announced, the Daily NK had supposed that the poorest or North Korea’s poor wouldn’t be hurt as badly as those with more savings to lose. To its credit, the paper is now correcting that supposition, having grasped a concept that probably isn’t taught in North Korean schools — supply-side economics: The source said, “Due to the bill exchange, business went bad and the authorities are cracking down on private trade in food, so problems for...

Categories Famine & Food Aid/NK Economics