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Tag Archives: Financial Regulation

The financial sector as engine for growth

31-May-08

The financial sector as engine for growth

There was no hope of applying the Chatham House rule at yesterday's talk by HE Dr Jun Kwang-woo, chairman of Korea's Financial Services Commission. With two TV cameras and numerous digital recorders on show, this meeting was firmly on the record. Reflecting the more formal nature of this meeting, Dr Jun spoke from a prepared text, though there was also a generous amount of time afterwards for Dr Jun to take questions from the floor. It was a whistle-stop tour for Dr Jun. Earlier in the week he had been at the IOSCO meeting in Paris, where he was appointed Chair of IOSCO's regional committee for Asia. He was only in London for the day and was heading back to Seoul immediately ...
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Top banking watchdog in town. You too can quiz him

27-May-08
Dr Jun Kwang Woo, the Chairman of the Korean Financial Services Commission, is in Paris and London this week for a range of meetings, including the UK finance minister and the FSA. He will also be speaking to the Korea Discussion Group at Chatham House on Friday afternoon at 4pm. His subject is Korea's responses to challenges from the global financial markets. The gathering will be chaired by Dr John Llewellyn, Senior Economic Policy Advisor at Lehman Brothers. Interested parties can join the discussion group by pre-registering (details at the bottom of this article). Further background on Dr Jun’s talk: Developments in international financial markets have brought opportunities for faster growth and expansion. At the same time, developments also mean that the ...
Filed in Business, Chatham House, Events news, KEB | Also tagged | Comments (0) »

Chaebols owning banks: should we be concerned?

15-Mar-08
One of the ideas to surface in the run-up to the Korean elections was that chaebols should once more be permitted to invest in banks. The proposed revision in policy prompted KBS to try to do a brief survey of practices in various markets in relation to rules regarding ownership of banks by non-bank companies. Copy deadlines back in Seoul prevented any really serious research in the UK, but here are the pointers I would have provided. As readers will be aware, the concern that some people raise when faced with the proposal is that the chaebols will use the banks as their personal "piggy-banks" - that is, the chaebols will use the banks they might own as a cheap source ...
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KEB blow by blow

23-Aug-07
Reports of HSBC's renewed interest in KEB have given me the impetus to resurrect a post which has been work-in-progress for a while. I've been periodically trying to google back in time to reconstruct the whole KEB saga, and yesterday's FT coverage gave a very useful framework on which to build. So here is another of my collections of links around a particular story, which I'll update as and when I come across more. The chronology and narrative is from the FT. The links are mine, many of them via Tom Coyner. August 2003 Lone Star agrees to pay Won1,400bn ($1.5bn) to take control of ailing Korea Exchange Bank. Lone Star to purchase Korean bank today, JoongAng Daily, 27 August 2003 New player in ...
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A regulatory nerd picks apart a Hankyoreh article

11-Oct-06
An interesting article (at least for that tiny population of amateur Koryologists whose day job involves bank regulatory capital ratios) in the Hankyoreh about Kookmin's acquisition of Korea Exchange Bank. As usual though, one gets frustrated reading stories written by people who don't have a clue what they're talking about and which are not properly checked by someone who does. Though I'm not an expert in Korean capital regulation (Yes, I'm frustrated with myself), it seems from the article that there are restrictions on the amount of capital a bank can invest in an affiliated bank or banks. And that limit is 30% of the investing bank's capital. But the author spoils it all with a confusion which he seems to share ...
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Korea and foreign investment

30-Mar-06
Standard Chartered Bank chairman Brian Sanderson, in a recent meeting with Roh Moo-hyun, said SCB's experience in Korea had been positive so far. It will be remembered that SCB bought Korea First Bank, South Korea's eight-largest lender, from US private equity firm Newbridge Capital and the Korean government for around $3.2bn a year ago, sneaking in front of a rumoured approach by HSBC. From the perspective of supervising the local banking market, hearsay evidence is that Korea's banking regulator, the Financial Supervisory Service, adopts a robust approach similar to other countries where the domestic banking market has significant ownership by large and sophisticated foreign players: the local regulator wants to fully understand what is done in their jurisdiction, and have some ...
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