"News! News, South Korea accepts the conditions of the World International Foundation and avoids bankruptcy, but experts estimate that South Korea's economy will go back at least 10 years! "On the streets of Hong Kong, the newsboys who sold newspapers were loudly shouting today's big news.
"This time, Korea is finished!" A white-collar worker bought a newspaper. After reading the news on it, he sighed.
When the Daqian government was fighting lawsuits in the United States, South Korea fell into a financial crisis. The cause of this financial crisis was still Soros. After he emptied Thailand's economy, he changed his target to South Korea and started to mess up South Korea's financial market.
From September, South Korea's banks started to go bankrupt, and South Korean Won fell from 989 to 1,012 USD. After that, it fell to 1,033 USD and continued to fall for a few days. In the end, it fell below 1,100 USD.
Very soon, South Korea's foreign reserves were less than 10 billion USD. South Korea's government had no choice but to give up on controlling and monitoring the foreign exchange market. After that, the South Korean Won fell rapidly, and it was comparable to Thailand.
After that, all South Korea's stocks fell rapidly, and one-third of South Korea's companies declared bankruptcy. In the end, South Korea announced on December 1st that they had accepted the International Monetary Fund's mediation and received a 58 billion USD loan.
But as a condition, South Korea must stop their free trade and capital account restrictions, and reform their labor market and state-owned enterprises. In any case, South Korea had to follow the wishes of the West to reform their governance. South Korea suffered an unprecedented blow, and all their development in the past 10 years was gone.
It is worth mentioning that in order to repay the loan, South Korea started an unprecedented patriotic and self-sacrificing movement.
Under the government's call, a quarter of South Korea's citizens joined the movement. People queued up and exchanged all their USD and gold for South Korean Won. Using this method, they helped the country accumulate USD to overcome the foreign exchange crisis and repay the 58 billion USD loan.
In the end, the government received 226 tonnes of gold and 2 billion USD of foreign exchange in less than two months. The total value is 4.2 billion USD.
Although this amount is not enough, it helped South Korea repay the 58 billion USD loan in August 2001. This is three years earlier than the original plan, and many South Koreans have bragged about this for their entire lives.
But when the media analyzed the data, they found out that most of the people who donated were ordinary people. South Korea's Samsung, Daewoo, Hyundai, and other wealthy families had also donated.
Although it seemed like a lot, each family had donated about one million USD in foreign exchange.
However, this was only equivalent to one ten-thousandth of their total wealth. Yet, ordinary people had donated almost all of their wealth. This caused many Koreans to cry out in grief.
The ones making money were those tycoons, but now that they were going to lose money, it was the poor and lowly commoners who had to use all their wealth to repay the country. It was simply tragic!
The incident in Korea had caused an uproar all over the world. At the same time, the entire Southeast Asia was terrified of Soros.
On the surface, this financial crisis was caused by Soros shorting South Korea's economy. But in fact, Soros did not do much. He only gave a slight push. He did not even push. He only revealed his intention of shorting South Korea's exchange rate, and the entire South Korean economy collapsed.
At the end of the day, this was a huge problem in South Korea. A large part of South Korea's development was based on loans from banks. This caused the banks to have a high rate of bad loans, and many of the banks' loans could not be recovered.
When South Korea's economy was booming, this was not a problem.
But as the economy tightened, the banks were shocked to find that they had no more money. When the news of Soros' arrival came, many Koreans immediately wanted to exchange their Korean Won to USD to prevent themselves from being cheated.
Of course, ordinary Koreans did not have such keen senses. Those who had such speed were the so-called elites in South Korea's financial industry. They were smart people and would not let themselves lose money.
However, it was precisely because of these so-called elites that Soros didn't even have the time to make a move before the entire Korean financial market collapsed. This made Soros very depressed.
South Korea's collapse was too fast, and Soros did not have time to deal with it. In the end, he even lost some money in South Korea. He did not know who to look for.
So, Soros was only the fuse that caused the collapse of South Korea's economy. The ones who killed the Koreans were the Koreans themselves, and it was their elites.
However, this fuse had already scared the entire Southeast region. Soros was like a devil in the eyes of the financial market and financial management departments of various countries.
But they could not deal with this devil. They could not even stop him from reaching out to them because he had the United States behind him. They held the banner of fairness and freedom high.
You can't oppose him. Do you really think that the big stick of the United States is a vegetarian?
So now, various countries in Southeast Asia were extremely afraid of Soros, especially those in South Korea that had already collapsed. They understood that Soros's gaze would definitely shift to other countries.
It was said that the relevant departments in Wanwan went to the United States immediately and placed orders of tens of billions of USD. Singapore relaxed some of the restrictions. Anyway, almost everyone was wagging their tails and begging the United States, trying to get Soros to let them go.
However, their actions were unnecessary. In the eyes of the truly knowledgeable people, these countries would not be Soros's target because their money was not easy to earn.
Soros's next target was only one, and that was Hong Kong.
In an instant, the entire Hong Kong was in a state of panic. Everyone was afraid of Soros's arrival.
However, what was to come would eventually come.
Time slowly entered the second half of December 1997. The wealth magazine of the United States was on sale as usual. The customers were surprised to find that there was actually an interview with Soros. Soros first defended himself in this interview, saying that he did not cause the financial crisis of various countries in Asia. Instead, they had economic problems to begin with. He just happened to be there at the right time, and it was not his fault at all.
This part of the interview looked normal, and Soros seemed to have some uneasiness in his conscience.
However, in the next second, when the reporter asked which other regions in Southeast Asia had economic problems and could burst the bubble at any time, Soros did not hesitate to give a name: Hong Kong.
In an instant, Hong Kong was dead silent. Everyone in the financial world felt that it was a bolt from the blue. Hong Kong was going to face a disaster!
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