Morning calm in financial markets despite mad Kim’s nuclear endgame
I feel like Forrest Gump, a barometer of Asian Armageddon. I’ve come to South Korea via Sri Lanka, where the triumphant Rajapakse brothers were parading the bullet-ridden body of Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran on state television to the tune of Star Wars. And now that I’m comfortably billeted in Seoul’s Hotel Shilla, preferred hostelry of Korea’s old-monied corporate clans, local media report that the former president Roh Moo-hyun has just killed himself and mad Kim up north is threatening to irradiate us all in an insane endgame of nuclear brinkmanship. Have I dodged suicide bombers in Sri Lanka only to meet my maker in the last episode of the Cold War?
I’m here to see how they’re dealing with the GEC — that’s global economic crisis. Just fine, as it happens, but another alarming acronym has Korea-watchers a-twitter: ICBMs, the ones Kim Jong-il is pointing across the troubled peninsula and beyond, to Japan and the US.
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