Editorial: The chip party isn't over. Seoul's party is. Only weeks ago, Seoul looked unstoppable. The KOSPI had nearly doubled this year, turning into one of the world's hottest equity markets. AI had become less an investment theme than a national obsession. Retail investors borrowed aggressively to buy leveraged ETFs tied to SK hynix, Samsung Electronics and the index itself. Every dip was bought. Every earnings beat was assumed. Every valuation looked justified because artificial intelligence was rewriting the rules. T July 29, 2026

Editorial: Super-weak yen is Korea's problem too The yen has just done something it hasn't done in 40 years: it broke past 163 to the dollar, a level not seen since 1986. In Tokyo, that's being read as bad news for Japanese households, who now face pricier imports and a shrinking real income. But Seoul shouldn't be watching this from the sidelines. A weaker yen doesn't just weaken Japan's currency — it chips away at Korean export competitiveness and drags the won down with it. The won has been s July 24, 2026

Editorial: From NATO to Mongolia: Seoul seeking strategic depth Viewed in isolation, President Lee Jae Myung's attendance at the NATO summit and his subsequent state visit to Mongolia may appear to belong to different diplomatic tracks. Together, however, they reveal a more coherent strategy. At NATO, Seoul sought to anchor South Korea more firmly within the emerging architecture of transatlantic defense cooperation. Discussions on expanding industrial cooperation and Seoul's negotiations toward a procurement framework with the all July 12, 2026

Editorial: Look beyond age, judge the crime The South Korean government is considering lowering the age threshold for juvenile offenders exempt from criminal prosecution from 14 to 13, but only for serious violent crimes. The proposal represents a compromise in a debate that has long divided public opinion between those seeking tougher punishment and those defending the existing juvenile justice system. The real issue, however, is not whether the legal threshold should be lowered by a single year. It is whether the justice system shou June 29, 2026

AI memory supercycle sparks Korean export renaissance The June export explosion: The AI memory supercycle and a new phase of growth for the Korean economy The June exports data offer an undeniable reason for national pride. According to Korea Customs Service preliminary data for the first 20 days of June, shipments jumped 60.4 percent on year to record $62 billion, drawing $17.5 billion in surplus. The South Korean economy is proving its critics wrong. The long, grueling winter of trade stagnation is decisively thawing, r June 23, 2026

True meaning of Jensen Huang's visits In the early summer of 2026, the industrial map of Asia experienced another massive tremor. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia—one of the world's most valuable companies—embarked on back-to-back visits to Taiwan and South Korea. This was no ordinary overseas business trip or routine client management. It was an on-the-ground inspection of the new global industrial order and power dynamics forged by the AI revolution. Simultaneously, it was a strategic move to June 19, 2026

Editorial: AI wealth dividend debate is one Korea cannot ignore Artificial intelligence is already creating a new global order of wealth. The rise of AI has propelled figures such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei into the center of global capital markets. Companies that dominate AI chips, frontier models, cloud infrastructure and data centers are accumulating value at a pace rarely seen in modern economic history. The question is whether that wealth will ultimately benefit society as a whole. June 14, 2026

South Korea's 20s and 30s were born into democracy, which explains their anger On the evening of June 3, voters in Seoul's Jamsil neighborhood lined up at their polling stations and were turned away. Not by armed soldiers, but by a paper shortage. Ballots had simply run out. It sounds almost absurd — a punchline for a country that has spent decades positioning itself as a model of democratic development in Asia. South Korea holds transparent elections, produces peaceful transfers of power, and boasts one of the most digitally sophisticated elector June 10, 2026

A siren song from the BOK: the leverage party is over SEOUL, May 28 (AJP) -For a full year, the Bank of Korea sat motionless on a 2.50 percent benchmark while the KOSPI staged the most spectacular rally on the planet — up more than 93 percent since year-end, briefly flirting with 8,450 before Wednesday's close. On Thursday, the central bank's new governor finally said out loud what the bond market had been bracing for: the only questions left are when, how fast, and how far rates rise. A plain-spoken siren to the lever May 28, 2026

The executive who sent his AI to the meeting SEOUL, May 24 (AJP) - Reid Hoffman has given dozens of talks since 2024 without always being in the room. The LinkedIn co-founder built "Reid AI," a digital twin trained on 22 years of his books, speeches, articles and podcasts, using HeyGen for the face and ElevenLabs for the voice. It speaks in languages he doesn't, answers questions in his style, and stands in for him at events he never attends. It is not a chatbot. It is, by design, another him. The Wall Street May 24, 2026