North Korea
The poor getting even poorer The North Korean people don’t have much – little food and heat, certainly no freedom – and now they have even less.
Pyongyang abruptly announced that it was revaluing its currency, the won, at a rate of 100 old won to 1 new won. And there are limits to how much money the North Koreans can exchange – 150,000 in cash and 300,000 in savings accounts. The typical North Korean is said to earn about 5,000 won a day.
The revaluation will effectively wipe out the savings and carefully hoarded cash reserves of millions of North Koreans, perhaps the regime’s way of keeping the people impoverished and subservient. And it fits a pattern of the government’s recent crackdown on the gray markets in food and household goods that the regime quietly tolerated when they sprang up during the famines of a decade ago. Apparently even a vestigial capitalism makes the rulers nervous.
South Korean observers said the revaluation set off a desperate scramble to convert old wons into dollars, euros and the Chinese yuan. Inside North Korea, the won officially trades at 145 to the dollar, but the black-market rate is more than 3,000 won to the dollar.
It is hard to see this as anything other than as an act of economic sadism against the North Korean people.
Scripps Howard News Service