Rural Asians added the Asian crisis had only proved how wise their grandfathers had been in buying gold chains instead of turning to the banks, many of which had gone bankrupt over the past two years. Since I subscribe to the cheerful theory that the stock market is a cross between a giant casino and a pyramid scheme, little that happens there seems to me of much social import. For those of you who think the stock market exists to raise capital for corporations to invest their plants and equipment, Henwood points out that the stock market has almost nothing to do with this. 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.