South Korean Financial Blogger Faces 18 Months of Prison

eldavojohn writes "A South Korean blogger named Park Dae-sung has been arrested and charged with destabilizing foreign markets by blogging about declining companies. This is the same blogger who predicted the economic downturn that has been experienced the world over. The Korean Times offers more information on the community college graduate and the accusations levied against him." Several readers have also sent in news that Omidreza Mirsayafi, an Iranian blogger arrested and imprisoned for his writings earlier this year, has now died in custody.

Comments

News from the future

[stox]

Blogger arrested for allowing facts to get in the way of a perfectly good argument.

Re:News from the future

[LaskoVortex]

Blogger arrested for allowing facts to get in the way of a perfectly good argument.

He was arrested, as you know, for "undermining the South Korean economy" with inaccurate ("false") statements on his blog. But if your country's economy can be undermined by a blog, then there is no hope for it anyway. In fact, barring the human rights component of these charges, S. Korea is doing worse harm to its economy by prosecuting this guy and thereby suggesting a mere blog has any influence whatsoever.

Believe It.

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect it.

Expect more of it. Even in the west.

Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter.

I mean really, they caused the last one, they'll be causing the next.

Would you give the keys to your new car after your friend rode your last one into the ground, and you couldn't drive for 15 years?

I think not.

Re:Believe It.

[jabithew]

I don't know what planet you anti-government/free market extremist types live on

I live on the planet UK. Here on planet UK our central bank has been measuring inflation based on CPI, and using this to set interest rates. This index excludes housing costs, unlike the previous RPI, in an era where house prices were the major inflationary pressure. In addition, though RPI has historically been about 1% higher than CPI, Gordon Brown reduced the target by 0.5%, giving more room for inflation.

Your claim that corporate loan rates are at fault doesn't stack up; low interest rate loans from the Bank of England kept the cost of corporate lending low, and market forces kept price for corporate lending low. Effectively the BoE applied a price ceiling to the wholesale money markets.

I remember years of being told we had only 2% inflation when the inflation we experienced was closer to 5%. Now we have a situation where the BoE has been forced to print money because the banks have so much of their capital tied up in inflated assets that nobody now wants to touch with a barge-pole. The LIBOR has decoupled from the BoE base rate because the BoE is simply not able to provide enough capital to service existing bank debts, let alone allow them to start loaning on more favourable terms.*

All the while we're being told that it's ok to print money because RPI is currently zero, even though CPI is still above target.

Finally, a warning for UK /.ers. Deflation is a myth! CPI will stay high, partly caused by the fall in the pound. If it does, Mr. King will have to raise interest rates, which will cause RPI to shoot through the roof, as the previously negative housing component turns positive. If you don't believe me, look at what the central bankers themselves think when they're forced to put their own money at risk.

Actually, one more thing. This diatribe could be taken to be a criticism of the Bank of England. I think that the Bank and its staff have behaved with decency and competence. The criticisms I make are general criticisms of a central bank model, which may still be a least-bad one, and a criticism of the brief they were given.

*The LIBOR also contains banks' mutual assessment of their reliability i.e. a risk premium. This is enlightening to see.

Re:Summary is inaccurate

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a South Korean, and I'll clarify.

The blogger (Minerva) claimed that South Korean government issued an "official order" for Korean banks not to purchase USD for a certain (short) period. IIRC, the average exchange rate during that particular day was going to be used in a lot of financial charts, so by gaming the system, many companies would look financially better in documents and the government will boast it to the people.

Turns out that there was no official order. Why create an official document when a phone call would suffice?

And, ladies and gentlemen, in South Korea, this is a felony that will ensure 18 months in prison. Only if he had correctly said "phone calls"! (Well, of course the government would've found yet another even more ridiculous excuse to punish him, so it won't matter much in the end. They are immune to logic. Why follow logic, when you can just throw one bullshit argument and another and still have half of the nation vote for you?)

Yes, you can make the economy plunge ...

[Slayer]

Anyone remember the UA debacle last September? If the markets are sufficiently hysterical, you can make them plunge with a single headline, regardless whether it's correct or not. The wrong reporting about UA was corrected immediately, yet it sent the markets into a nose dive from which they haven't recovered yet. Regardless of whether the blogger is correct with his statements or not, I would call the reaction of the south korean gov't alarming and telling of the economic troubles soon to emerge there.

So what this incident with the south korean blogger tells me:

• The south korean economy is on the verge of big trouble
• The south korean government is aware of it and desperately tries to keep this concealed
• The south korean government has never heard a thing about the Streisand effect

Re:Summary is inaccurate

[ihavnoid]

I am a native South Korean who live in Seoul, and maybe I can (sort of) explain a bit about the law.

Yes, the websites hate the law pretty much (because it requires the companies to add 'ID authentication system', which isn't cheap in a market with razor-thin profits), and many Koreans who do care about privacy also hate it, too. I also feel sort of sad when that law passed.

Well, the reason behind this law was something like this. In slashdot, if you see a troll, you simply moderate that reply a '-1, troll', and move along. In Korea, people start 'feeding' the troll in more cruel ways, e.g. track down the real-world identy of that guy, bomb his personal website with hate spams, bomb his e-mail, and in some occasions, even e-mails of people close to him. Yup, the replies on that troll became the real-world identy of that guy, rather than another troll, or any reasonable reply.

The horrifying thing was that this phenomenom wasn't limited to real-world celeberities. It could be you, or me, or anybody on the net. Yes, being a troll, or saying something stupid isn't a good thing to do, but we all do make mistakes. I've seen people ranging from teenage girls to senior citizens getting horribly bullied by anonymous mobs. Occasionally, there were news reports on people commiting suicide because of the mental horror they had to undergo. It got so serious that people needed to stay completely anonymous on all occasions, or having some way to stop this maddness.

Yes, I feel that many of the Korean people don't think political freedom is such an important thing compared to things such as security or wealth. This may be because their history of democracy has been so short, and they have been living a hard life for many years suffering from poverty, hunger, and North Korea. Republic of Korea is merely some 60-years old, and approximately half of that period was under the rule of dictators. In such a society, it is difficult to teach why political freedom is important and dictatorship is bad, because those people who benefited a lot from the dictatorship still exists in many core positions of the society. I believe it may take some time, patience, education, and continuous struggling.