Mass lay-offs loom in South Korea as corporate revamp starts

It’s been like a game of massive macroeconomic chicken: who will blink first, the Chinese government or the state-owned South Korean banks? The story in shipping for the past decade is that there have been too many ships; and that’s because ship prices were exceptionally low, and that’s because there were too many shipyards; and there were too many shipyards because the Chinese have been producing far too much steel, so that has been ultra-cheap as well. The national and provincial Chinese authorities allowed this to happen because they needed to fill jobs. Unfortunately, as South Korea’s shipping and shipbuilding sectors now teeter on wide-scale bankruptcy, it would appear those jobs were originally held by the workers in Okpo, Masan, Ulsan and other places along the country’s heavily industrialised southern coast. This is likely to lead to some serious social strife.