On September 25, South Korea’s Finance Minister Chou Ching ho said on his TV program on Sunday that the current weakness of the Korean won was different from what South Korea faced during the global financial crisis or the Asian market turmoil in the late 1990s.
Qiu Qinghao said that there was no need to worry too much. We have about 430 billion US dollars of foreign exchange reserves, ranking ninth in the world.” Qiu Qinghao said that South Korea held about 740 billion dollars worth of foreign assets, compared with negative values in 1997 and 2008. He also mentioned that the IMF said in August that South Korea’s economic fundamentals were sufficient to withstand external shocks.