South Korea's KOSPI plunges nearly 20% as president urges calm

South Korea sinks and its president calls for calm

The KOSPI, South Korea's benchmark stock index, has lost nearly 20% in recent days. Against that backdrop, the country's president has had to come out publicly to ask people not to take their own lives and to remind them that a helpline exists, 109. A scene more typical of a country at war than of an advanced economy, it has peine the debate about the Korean model: a society that, according to one participant, combines the highest number of plastic surgery procedures per capita in the world with brutal suicide rates and an addiction to leverage that many describe as a way of escaping the modern slavery of exams and large corporations.

The collapse is not just financial. Some argue that extreme leverage —buying stocks and cryptocurrencies with borrowed money— works as a lottery for a generation that sees no other way out. When the lottery goes wrong, the punishment is double: the debt does not disappear with the player. That is the trap many have been pointing to these days.

The Universe 25 experiment and the comparison with Korea

The comparison that has circulated the most is with Universe 25, John B. Calhoun's experiment in which a population of mice, with plenty of food and space, ended up collapsing from social saturation. The analogy is exaggerated, but it has caught on because it describes something recognizable: a country with fierce competitive pressure, a suicide rate that refuses to fall, and a population betting what it does not have on a long shot.

Some point to hold culture —keeping the position even as the asset plummets— as more of a trap than a strategy. And others remind us that the problem is not only economic: it is about expectations. South Korea has built a performance machine that works in the statistics and fails the people.

What can be done when the money runs out

Amid the pessimism, part of the analysis has focused on the practical: what support networks exist for those left without income. Spain's Ingreso Mínimo Vital (minimum living income), regional minimum income schemes and municipal social services are doors that many people entitled to them never knock on, simply because they do not know they exist. The comparison with unemployment benefits in Spain has served as a reminder that the institutional safety net, however imperfect, makes a difference.

The question that remains open is an uncomfortable one: can a president stop with a phone line what an economic model causes? The 109 exists. So does the KOSPI.