2026.02.13
The Problem Starts with the ‘Villain Narrative’ When the real estate market heats up, society quickly looks for someone to blame. That blame typically falls on “people who own multiple homes”—multiple-home owners. Intuitively, this makes sense. They buy multiple properties, drive up prices, take away opportunities for others to buy homes, and raise rents… This narrative sticks in people’s minds. So policy tends to lean toward “punishing” them: raising taxes, tightening loans, expanding regulated areas, and sometimes even sending messages about “forcing them to sell.”
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Why This Employment Report Became a ‘Rate’ Story Employment indicators are fundamentally about people and jobs, yet in financial markets they’re frequently translated into interest rate narratives. Sometimes, paradoxically, the statement that “there was no shock” becomes major news. This case is precisely that. The U.S. January 2026 employment report—typically read as that month’s economic thermometer—was released on February 11, 2026, with figures landing not just “better than feared” but tilting toward “better than expected.”
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The Reality Revealed by Ministry of Employment and Labor & Financial Supervisory Service Statistics Retirement pensions may seem like “money that rolls on its own,” but in Korea, “automatic” generally means “money that automatically flows into deposits.” The numbers tell this story. According to statistics jointly released by these agencies, retirement pension reserves at the end of 2023 totaled approximately 382 trillion won, with principal-protected products accounting for about 87% and performance-based products around 13%. In other words, most of the money was sitting in a “retirement waiting” state rather than being used for “retirement investment.”
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The Invisible Tax Created by Interchange Fees From a consumer’s perspective, a card payment is simple magic—just a beep and you’re done. But from a merchant’s perspective, there’s a small tax bill attached to that beep. At the heart of this tax is the ‘interchange fee.’ It’s like a wholesale price that flows from the merchant’s bank (the acquirer) to the cardholder’s bank (the issuer), according to rules set by the card network. A UK government document explaining how EU regulations were implemented domestically quite bluntly describes interchange fees as “fees set by the card network, paid by the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank, and ultimately borne by the merchant.”
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Executive Summary The phrase ‘40-year-old retirement’ sounds like an exaggerated slogan, but the core isn’t the number 40 but rather the premise “income will continue by remaining at one company until retirement age” is collapsing. Structurally, retirement timing advances while institutionally pensions, re-employment, and retraining fail to keep pace, lengthening income gaps (bridges).
Three engines sit at this phenomenon’s center. First, seniority-based wages and rigid internal labor markets weaken middle-aged regular employment demand. Second, companies respond to uncertainty eras with ‘fixed cost reduction,’ with hiring also shifting from ‘regular→occasional’ and ’long-term→project.’ Third, automation and AI adoption simultaneously push both “complementation” and “substitution” by job function, with particularly high substitution expectations appearing in certain job groups.
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Why the Term ‘Liquidity Engine’ Emerges Now The word liquidity is often used casually as “good liquidity when lots of money flows,” but in reality it’s far more physical. Questions like whether settlements finish on time, whether interest rates don’t spike when posting collateral to borrow money, and whether banks and funds can breathe in overnight funding markets all constitute liquidity. And this liquidity isn’t explained by one sentence like “the central bank prints money.” Plumbing matters more.
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The Night Before, Markets Take One Breath Called ‘Relief’ That day’s domestic session’s starting point wasn’t Korea but the U.S. On the previous trading day (local time), Wall Street saw tech stocks rebound with major indices jointly rising. Especially Nasdaq and S&P 500 rose meaningfully, with sessions where anxieties that “have AI valuations run too far ahead?” briefly eased. AI hardware representative stocks like Nvidia showed strength to lift sentiment, with bounce-backs also emerging from software sides after plunges. ‘Risk-on’ signals like Oracle surges also appeared together.
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What Has Been Confirmed and What Remains Unknown In mid-January 2026, a South Korean research team announced securing “high-concentration rare earth” samples from the deep seabed of the western Pacific high seas. The most important fact is this: it’s closer to “extracted sediment (mud) through coring that showed quite high rare earth concentrations” rather than “found a commercially viable mine.” According to the announcing entity’s materials, samples collected in July 2025 via piston coring at approximately 5,800m depth showed maximum 3,100ppm and average over 2,000ppm concentrations.
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The Debate’s Starting Point is Electricity and Carbon’s Timetable The question “solar or nuclear” always sounds like an exam forcing choice between two. However, South Korea’s power system isn’t an exam but reality, and reality usually doesn’t permit one-line answers. What this nation faces now isn’t a ‘preference’ problem but a ’timetable’ problem. Electricity becomes more necessary, and carbon must be reduced faster.
First, the demand side. The 11th Basic Plan for Long-term Electricity Supply and Demand sees power system consumption increasing from 557.1TWh in 2024 to 735.1TWh in 2038. Summer peak demand also grows from 104.2GW in 2024 to 145.6GW in 2038 over the same period. Not just ‘annual total usage’ but ‘instantaneous maximum’ grows more threateningly. This plan emphasizes particularly reflecting data centers (based on new electricity use applications, etc.) and electrification demand as “additional demand” separately. In other words, diagnosis that future power demand became difficult to explain with macro variables like economy and population alone.
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Why ‘Invisible Factories’ Suddenly Got Loud When explaining the generative AI boom, people usually think of ‘models,’ ‘chips,’ and ‘investment amounts.’ But what actually shakes politics and daily life are things that weren’t visible. Gray box-like buildings, windowless warehouses, servers and coolers filling them, and the electricity feeding them all. Data centers were large before too, but now they’re no longer at “nice to have” levels in electrical systems. In the U.S., data centers consumed about 4.4% of power in 2023, with estimates publicly disclosed in official reports and government announcements that by 2028 this could reach 6.7-12% depending on scenarios. Figures estimated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2014: 58TWh → 2023: 176TWh, 2028: 325-580TWh) make people tangibly feel “where electricity demand springs from” in daily life units. The U.S. Department of Energy also introduced the same report, nailing down as policy issues that “AI diffusion and data center expansion pull up power demand.”
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Executive Summary Since the war in Ukraine, the energy order has shifted from a question of “who sells cheaper gas” to a question of “who controls which routes, ships, insurance, and financial rails.” Europe pivoted sharply from dwindling Russian pipeline gas to LNG, and in that process global LNG volumes were reallocated from Asia and Latin America toward Europe, shaking prices, contracts, and logistics at the same time. The IEA notes that in 2022 European LNG imports increased by 64 bcm (over 60% year-on-year), effectively replacing the decline in Russian pipeline flows.
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The Structure That Makes KOSDAQ Bio a Rollercoaster When discussing KOSDAQ bio in Korean stock markets, the atmosphere is always peculiar. Some days it becomes “future food,” other days “a community of those caught at peaks.” This temperature difference is closer to a structural problem than an emotional one. KOSDAQ inherently has high growth stock proportions, and among them, bio is an industry “priced by events rather than earnings.” A single Phase 2 clinical data point, one technology export disclosure, one rights offering can split a company’s next 2-3 years. So both indices and individual stocks show frequent ‘discontinuous jumps’ rather than ‘continuous flows.’
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