The Kia stand-off
Calling all expatriate Korean investment bankers with international corporate finance and restructuring experience: go home - your country needs you.
Your country still distrusts foreigners and their ideas, so perhaps you can introduce the techniques required to ease its worsening corporate and banking credit crisis, and avert the economic implosion threatening to follow it.
Success would allow Korea to complete its transition to the market-based economy it needs as it matures. Failure would mean a worsening chain of chaebol (industrial group) and even banking collapses that might ultimately force the heavy-handed government intervention that policymakers seem to be trying to avoid.
Most immediately in need of help are Korean bankers. Already reeling under the bankruptcy of two large chaebol - Hanbo and Sammi - and desperately trying to avert the same fate at two others - Jinro and Daenong - Korea's bank chiefs were just preparing for the...
