Here's a great photo found at the blog of Nyquist Capital. It's of a rally to encourage people to invest in the stock market. The up arrows, gigantic bull, and Rally Korea! sign pretty much gets the message across. In a way it's not that much different from those Nasdaq-100 ads with the CEOs of Starbucks, Staples and Microsoft, but in Korea it's been deemed that there's a pressing need to broaden participation in the market--in 2005 only 8% of the population owned stock. Too bad, they've really missed out. I guess that's why they have a need for this kind of public rally.
Update: Asiapundit adds more--One of the strange things about South Korea is that public rallies often work. Moreover, they often work so well that they create brand new problems. In one of the notable recent examples, the government and banks promoted credit card use to encourage domestic consumerism and reduce tax evasion (cards leave a paper trail). That one worked really, really well.
Not sure I'd want to sit under that end of the bull(market).
Posted by: Jeff Bass | January 17, 2006 at 12:11 PM