Word: jonge
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...course, the "core problem" is the U.S. property market, says Han de Jong, chief economist for ABN Amro in Amsterdam. "In hindsight, the housing market in the U.S. was a bubble." The cause? Superlow interest rates that encouraged lenders to offer loans to virtually anyone, even those with bad credit. Those loans were then bundled together into exotic derivatives and sold off to financial institutions worldwide; when borrowers began to default on their mortgages, money managers from São Paulo to Seoul suffered huge losses...
Such is the parlous state of commerce in the world's last Stalinist holdout. On Oct. 2, North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, held a historic meeting with South Korea's President, raising hopes that diplomatic progress in the effort to get Kim to abandon nuclear weapons, along with an easing of the country's self-imposed isolation, might ultimately lead to economic reforms. And for foreign investors lured by what Devonshire-Ellis calls the "barren romance" of the place, North Korea holds obvious, if modest, attractions: a highly literate workforce with average daily wages that are about half...
...pledge to attend the controversial Airang Games, a massive synchronized gymnastic performance often used as a propaganda tool that glorifies the regime. Kim also appeared - to put it charitably - a little distant in Roh's company, a stark contrast to the first summit seven years ago when Kim Jong Il welcomed former president Kim Dae Jung wholeheartedly. "Roh definitely got a less emotional reception," says Paik Hak Soon, a North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute...
...surprisingly, the joint agreement also failed to make any mention of thorny issues such as the fate of both South Korean prisoners of war and abductees in North Korea. Perhaps Kim Jong Il will address those topics if he fulfills an earlier promise to visit the South's capital. But it's not likely...
...deal, brokered by China, the price for North Korea's denuclearization is the U.S. taking regime change off the table and offering security guarantees and the phased normalization of economic and political relations with a regime currently on the U.S. list of nations sponsoring terrorism. Kim Jong Il's odious regime will thus survive (unless or until it collapses under its own weight) as the price for making the region considerably safer. A compromise, then, but as many diplomatic observers had long warned, the only deal possible to avoid confrontation...