As a side note, I was talking with an executive of foreign credit institution, and he said that while foreign companies write off bad debts after 3 months (and get spanked for that by the Financial Supervisory Board) Korean credit instituions keep those dud amounts up to a year, presenting every quarter results that look far better than they look. I'd be surprised if the increasing debt amounts don't catch up with them soon.

It already has and Korean government is already involved in big ways. In fact, they are scaling back the plans so debters don't holdout to wait for better deals.

Yes and no, Don. What has caught up with them is, as you point out, the government, because the debts have caught up with the card users. We both have heard of and read about suicides, robberies, murders and other horrors committed by people who were desperate for money. Money they didn't have, but had used via those little plastic thingies, that companies issued like discount vouchers. But all the measures the gov't is planning so far, correct me here if I am wrong, are targetting the so-called victims (I have little pity for people running Visa-card debts in the tens of millions of won). Nothing yet is scheduled for the cleaning of theit balanced sheets, or the curbing of credit card use. The trite attempts, on TV, from companies like LG card, to "educate" the public on credit card use is to be balanced with the active marketing and the lax procedures in issuing cards. Meanwhile, it is still an ordeal for a foreigner, even a very well-paid one, to get a credit card, because, as I was told several times, "you may leave the country, leaving a debt behind you". Apparently, Korean nationals are, on the other hand, allowed to stack up debts, without having to run away...

I found your blog quite by accident this A.M. and am quite intrigued by your comments. I am quite convinced that we Americans will soon see the worst depression the world has ever known and the rest of the world will quickly end up in the same shape as a result of the coming crash of the American economy which can't be more than a couple of years off at best. I've written an article about it on my blog at http://creditwrench.blogspot.com and so I won't go into it too much here as it is a long article. Of course it will roll off into history in a few days but I never actually let that happen as I always archive my articles as webpages and link to them. Here is what is happening now and what I think the result will be. First of all, the prime rate is now at 1% and even the Federal Reserve has publicly stated that there is nothing at all they can realistically do to stop it from going negative. All they can do is forestall the day when it will happen and the only viable means of doing so is using their vast reserves of cash to purchase government instruments of debt such as CD's loan portfolios and whatever. They started doing that about 2 months ago and are buying government liabilities at the alarming rate of 11 billion dollars a day with the result that our money supply is shrinking drastically. All this money is being pumped into the stock markets and into the money markets as well and the recent market increases are the result. This makes it artificially appear that our economy is growing at a brilliant 8% this quarter and gives our government the ability to shout from the roof tops that there is nothing to fear and that our economy is robust and healthy. But today we have no agricultural base and we have no industrial base and our jobless rates are increasing heavily as our population ages rapidly.