IMF, Financial Crisis... Every Crisis Started Like This | Soongsil University Economics Professor Seo Joon-sik #1 [Monthly Seo Joon-sik]
- What to look for
- Viewers can check his side-by-side comparison of the common conditions behind the Great Depression, the Japan bubble, subprime, and the IMF crisis with today's US mix of AI boom, corporate debt, and rising rates.
- Why it matters
- Understanding his crisis-reading frame of boom, debt, and rate trigger helps viewers judge for themselves whether rate decisions and debt news signal crisis risk ahead.
AI summary
Professor Seo Joon-sik recalls his criticism from 2 years ago that cutting rates would be a disaster, as Korea raises rates two months running and the 10-year yield climbs from the high 2% range to 4.5%, and judges the moment has finally come. The economy worsened to its worst despite rate cuts because of structural problems rates cannot fix, such as 100 ten-thousand self-employed closures and the domestic slump, and he cites Governor Shin Hyun-seong's argument that household debt beyond a certain level reduces effective demand. He defines a crisis as a real-economy downturn spreading into bank failures and financial-system trouble, and notes the Great Depression, the Japan bubble, and subprime all burst after Industrial Revolution-era booms and expansions. Today's AI boom and corporate-debt expansion resemble the eve of past crises, especially the IMF crisis in their corporate-debt centering, and he worries more about excessive lending by neo-clouds and SoftBank and private-fund-intermediated funding than about big tech itself. As the US approaches his three conditions for a crisis, surging production in a boom, unnoticed debt growth, and rate hikes, he reveals he bought a Nasdaq inverse ETF for the first time in his life in a tasting size. With money units unlike the past, such as astronomical data-center orders from OpenAI and Anthropic and trillion-unit valuations, he doubts even a sturdy direct-finance system can handle it. Korea will avoid a crisis, he says, since household debt sits with the top 20% who can repay and Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and September (month 9) exports of 1,200 hundred-million dollars support it, but he warns of a real-estate shock around 2028 and distorted statistics as export profits flow only into property instead of domestic demand. All directional views are the speaker's conditional judgment and do not confirm any short-term price forecast.