Unless you have been living under a rock, you'll know that South Korea's stock market has been rocketing higher on the back of the AI/Semi speculation as SK Hynix and Samsung have dominated (accounting for over 40% of the KOSPI market cap)...
But, as the following chart from Goldman Sachs shows, this surge in Korean stocks has been driven by domestic Retail investors as Foreign investors have fled that market en masse...
These outflows have sparked a collapse in the Korean Won (exacerbated by pressure some Asian currencies face as the Iran war drags on), now at its weakest versus the USDollar since 2009...
...and pushed yields for South Korean bonds to their highest in almost 3 years...
With all that in mind, Bloomberg reported earlier in the week that South Korean officials have intensified monitoring of the government bond market through daily phone calls and a private messaging group with market participants, as authorities step up efforts to contain rising yields.
Since May 18, a group of deputy directors in the finance ministry’s treasury-bond division have been calling bond dealers and asset managers before the start of trading to gauge market sentiment and investor positioning, Hwang Soon Kwan, deputy finance minister for treasury, said in an interview. In some cases, the discussions are held in person, he said.
“We are paying close attention to managing the bond market and are determined to respond firmly to any excessive moves,” Hwang said Friday in Seoul.
The ministry also set up a private KakaoTalk chat room on May 21 that now includes about 17 participants, according to Hwang.
Members include Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol, senior ministry officials, researchers, primary dealers and fund managers, who share research reports and market views on a daily basis.
The moves are not intended to press yields down, but to signal authorities are closely monitoring the market, he added.
The government last week reduced planned bond issuance for June by about 21% from the previous month, adding to efforts to ease upward pressure on yields.
Additionally, just days later, Bloomberg reports that Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol said authorities were closely monitoring FX market developments “with a high degree of vigilance to prevent anxiety from spreading,” and vowed to “take prompt, necessary measures in case of excessive market moves.”
Asian policymakers are coming up against the limit of their currency defense as elevated oil prices hurt the region’s importers.
Authorities in Indonesia and the Philippines also stepped up measures to defend currencies.
“The authorities are doing what they can, but given that the won is being driven by external factors, it’s likely difficult to control,” said So Jaeyong, chief economist at Shinhan Bank in Seoul.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/04/2026 - 17:20Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,
More than 1 million scam-related online accounts were taken down, and millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency were frozen, as part of a crackdown on Southeast Asian scam networks.
Scam center workers, many of whom were trafficked and forced to work for criminals, are guarded by Karen Border Guard troops in Myawaddy, Burma, on Feb. 26, 2025. Stringer/ReutersThe crackdown operations, conducted by U.S. and international agencies led by the Department of Justice (DOJ), began on May 18, when the DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force brought together the FBI, Royal Thai Police, and law enforcement agencies from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand to identify and disrupt criminal scam networks.
Meta, Microsoft, Starlink, and Coinbase were part of joint operations held in Washington and Bangkok, Meta said in a June 3 statement.
"More than a million online assets were disrupted as a result of the operation - including 1.4 million accounts, pages, and groups across Facebook and Instagram, 20,000 Microsoft accounts, and thousands of Starlink kits - and the Royal Thai Police has arrested 63 individuals involved in scam operations," Meta said.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase "froze more than $3 million in cryptocurrency assets tied to criminal networks." In addition, Starlink "terminated connectivity for thousands of Starlink kits that were attributed to unlawful use," it said.
Criminal syndicates behind the fraud have exploited millions of people globally via romance scams and investment fraud, and through utilizing forced labor. This makes coordinated disruption critical to protecting people, Meta said.
FBI Director Kash Patel thanked Meta for the company's assistance in a June 3 post on X, and said the operation was "just the beginning!"
The DOJ said that the joint initiative interrupted malicious network connections hosted by scammers. Moreover, servers and hosting infrastructure associated with the scam networks in Southeast Asia were decommissioned.
Many scam centers are run from Laos, Cambodia, and Burma along the border with Thailand, across several industrial-scale compounds.
As for forced labor, criminal networks lure unsuspecting people to Thailand with promises of high-paying jobs, then seize their identification and coerce them to work at such sites. The victims run scams against targets under the threat of violence.
In its recent statement, Meta said that intelligence-sharing among entities has led to the identification of several potential new scam center locations and networks.
"Blockchain technology is one of the most powerful tools we have in the fight against financial crime," Leah Bressack, vice president at Coinbase, said.
"Unlike traditional financial systems, the transparent and immutable nature of transaction data means bad actors can't hide - every transaction leaves a trail. That transparency is exactly what allowed us to work with law enforcement to trace, freeze, and disrupt these criminal networks."
Crackdown On FraudThe crackdown follows President Donald Trump's signing of an executive order on March 6 to counter scam operations - Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens.
"Cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes are draining American families of their life savings, stealing the benefits of years of work, and destroying the lives of our youth," Trump said in the order.
"It is the policy of the United States to protect Americans from, and harden our financial and digital systems against, these threats. The United States shall counter attacks on Americans with a commensurate response that includes law enforcement, diplomacy, and potential offensive actions."
According to the recent DOJ statement, the Scam Center Strike Force is a "critical node" in executing Trump's order.
Online scams pose a major financial threat to Americans. An April 2025 report from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center revealed that the center received 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crimes in 2024.
The total financial losses from these crimes amounted to $16 billion, a 33 percent increase from the previous year.
Older adults were significantly affected, with 147,127 complaints filed by people aged 60 or older, totaling $4.88 billion in losses.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/04/2026 - 17:00Far-left Turkish-American millionaire and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker lashed out during a Tuesday livestream after his friend, San Francisco congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti, was badly defeated in the primary race to succeed Nancy Pelosi.
Chakrabarti, a former aide to the unhinged socialist NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, spent $10 million of his own money but was polling around 15% with about half the vote counted.
Piker strangely blamed Chakrabarti's poor performance on San Francisco's urban layout and car dependency, despite the city's reputation for public transit.
He then pivoted into attacking the city's affluent liberal voter base:
You know what it is? I know what it is. F**king car-reliant infrastructure. The more cars you have, the more chuddy the f**king city is.
That's it. No public transit. No f**king people living close to one another. It's just f**king rich liberals who just want homo-fascism in the country, that's it. They want gay fascism. They want gay techno-fascism.
X user Dipper captured Piker's livestream meltdown in a post titled "He's so fucking mad, commies down horrendously."
He's so fucking mad, commies down horrendously. https://t.co/VAySH1m6kV pic.twitter.com/J0SM3dXEO9
— Dipper (@dipperid) June 3, 2026Late Wednesday, Chakrabarti blamed his loss on outside money from AI, crypto, and AIPAC-linked interests ...
The campaign has ended, but the mission remains. We must wrest control of our country away from the corporations and back into the hands of people. And the only force capable of doing that is a movement of people unlike any we have seen in generations. Thank you to everyone who… pic.twitter.com/P1yDPz4Aie
— Saikat Chakrabarti for Congress (@saikatc) June 4, 2026As for Piker, he's made the news in recent weeks after committing an operational-security mistake by publicly identifying American Marxist tech financier Neville Roy Singham, who has reportedly been living in China and has been linked by The New York Times to CCP-aligned propaganda networks, as a major financier of pro-Marxist revolutionary NGOs operating inside the U.S.
The question political observers are asking is: What has the Democratic Party become? Really it has been radicalized, championing anti-American values, promoting socialism and Marxism, aligning with revolutionary far-left NGOs funding chaos in the streets, and some of that may point to foreign influence operations run through the Singham network and other dark-money-funded NGOs.
"This realignment of Democratic Party power, away from the old-school, Ivy League establishment, into the hands of the socialists, the radical Muslims and the guys with Nazi tats, will have profound implications for the 2028 presidential race," Owen Gregorian noted on X.
The age of the Democratic Party blocking fringe outsiders is officially over | David Marcus, Fox News
There were two events on Tuesday that offered more proof of a national Democratic Party establishment that has lost control: One was a meeting, one an election, and both are… pic.twitter.com/ENMYpVJmIe
Democrats have become the party of incoherent lunatics.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/04/2026 - 16:40