Corporations finance about 90 percent of their investments internally, through their own profits, and according to Henwood, on those rare occasions when they turn to outside finance, they go first to banks and then to the bond market. The richest 1 percent of the population has more investable wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Financial democracy is even more an affair of the elites than the political kind. I now believed everything was a fraud, and I had a well-founded basis for my beliefs. In a nation where a man's status is largely measured by position and power, Suh Sang-rok quit the No. 2 job at one of South Korea's largest conglomerates to wait on tables in a restaurant.
Any job is honorable.
In Korea, that's an almost heretical idea. Recent generations of South Koreans grew up thinking real success came from attending the country's top schools and getting a white-collar job at a top conglomerate, known as chaebol. But near-economic collapse, wholesale corporate bankruptcies and record joblessness in the last two years have forced Koreans to rethink old ways. Never in recent memory has a man from one of Korea's most elite and powerful chaebol steered himself into a job so modest. As vice chairman of the Sammi Group for five years, Suh held an enviable position in what once was Korea's 26th largest conglomerate and the world's third biggest producer of specialty steel.