[imported_bingobazza]

[ QUOTE ]
fear is the mindkiller

[/ QUOTE ]

eh?....if you arent afraid of stocks at the moment, you dont know very much about them....but S Korea could be very good...provided you recognise the cyclical nature of the stock valuations...theres no new paradigm here. As for political tensions, N Korea and the US had some successful talks a couple of weeks back about the nuclear issue, and although nothing was solved, some nice noises came out of the meetings. S Korea isnt a banana republic by any means, but it will suffer from drops in consumption, as has already been stated. The major regional political issue therefore is the widely anticipated coup by Beijing in Taiwan next year to reunite China...swift and targeted at the political leaders...no long war...prolly just a weekend.

The regional financial issues are the revaluation of the Yuan and the unwinding of Beijings stock positions in the domestic markets, scheduled for the next 6-8 months. Now HERE is a golden opportunity...after the dust settles. The big auditors have been in town for a while, cleaning everything up in preperation for this...and theres an avalanche of cash waiting on the sidelines for this mass privatisation to go through.

The major, (unstoppable?) investment theme in the region IMO is booming chinese consumption for export market manufacturing and domestic consumption. The biggest winners here will be resource rich neighbours like Vietnam, the Phillipines, Australia, Malaysia, Russia and Thailand who supply the commodities to China. I think that this theme is much stronger than the growing S Korean exports theme.

Fear is the mother of preperation.

Bingo