President Lee Jae Myung has said South Korea would face a similar financial crisis to the one in 1997 if Seoul accepts Washington’s investment demands without safeguards, but his government aims to finalize a trade deal with the United States as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Reuters ahead of his trip to New York for the U.N. General Assembly, Lee said South Korea’s $350 billion investment pledge under a framework deal reached in July would not be feasible without financial mechanisms, such as a currency swap arrangement.<\/p>\n
“Without a currency swap, if we were to withdraw $350 billion in the manner that the U.S. is demanding and to invest this all in cash in the U.S., South Korea would face a situation as it had in the 1997 financial crisis,” Lee said in the interview.<\/p>\n
The two countries have previously signed swap arrangements only twice, during the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
When asked whether talks could extend into next year, he said, “We should end this unstable situation as soon as possible.”<\/p>\n
Lee said South Korea is different from Japan, which struck a trade deal with a $550 billion investment package, noting that Tokyo has more than double South Korea’s $410 billion in foreign exchange reserves, has an international currency in the yen and maintains a swap line with the U.S.<\/p>\n
He said Seoul and Washington have agreed in writing that any investment projects must be commercially viable, but working out the details is proving difficult.<\/p>\n
Lee added that U.S. immigration authorities’ recent arrest of more than 300 South Korean workers at a battery factory construction site in Georgia had sparked public anger but stressed that the raid would not undermine the bilateral alliance.<\/p>\n
In a separate interview with Britain’s BBC, Lee said his government would accept a deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to freeze production of the North’s nuclear weapons for now, rather than get rid of them.<\/p>\n
Lee told BBC that the North was producing an additional 15-20 nuclear weapons a year and a freeze \u2014 as “an interim emergency measure” \u2014 would be “a feasible, realistic alternative.”<\/p>\n
“So long as we do not give up on the long-term goal of denuclearization, I believe there are clear benefits to having North Korea stop its nuclear and missile development,” Lee said in the interview.<\/p>\n
“The question is whether we persist with fruitless attempts towards the ultimate goal [of denuclearization] or we set more realistic goals and achieve some of them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Lee Jae Myung has said South Korea would face a similar financial crisis to the one in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-36479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}