Oh Sehoon Criticizes Lee Government Over Market Plunge: "Election-Driven Stock Gambling Opened the Gates of Hell"

"Rather than communicating on social media, announce measures to address the stock market crash"

Seoul Mayor Oh Sehoon directly criticized the Lee Jae-myung government over last week’s plunge in the domestic stock market.

Oh Sehoon, Mayor of Seoul. Photo by Kim Hyunmin

On the 8th, Mayor Oh criticized the government in a post titled “Stock-Market Gambling for Local Elections: Stop Dodging Responsibility” on Facebook, saying, “The circuit breaker, the last line of defense that forcibly halts market trading when stock prices plunge by 8% or more, has been triggered 11 times on the securities market this year alone. Nine of those instances were concentrated in the five-month period from June, just after the local elections, through last week.” A circuit breaker halts stock trading for 20 minutes if the KOSPI remains down by 8% or more for over one minute.

He said, “On May 28, just six days before the local elections, the government went ahead with the risky move of sharply raising the National Pension Service’s target allocation to domestic stocks from 14.9% to 20.8%. It made even the National Pension Service, which is responsible for people’s retirement security, serve as a support for the stock market.” He added, “What poured fuel on the fire was high-risk leveraged products. The administration took the lead in fueling the illusion of rising stock prices, and people staked their assets on that illusion. Middle-aged and older people poured in their retirement savings, while young people scraped together money for marriage and even for buying a home before jumping into the stock market.”

Mayor Oh said, “In the end, this became a massive gambling den where the government used the National Pension Service as seed money to raise the stakes and opened the way for people to increase their bets through high-risk leveraged products.” He criticized the government, saying, “The Lee Jae-myung government’s reckless arrogance in believing it can move the market at will has ultimately opened the gates of hell.”

He said, “This is not the time for the president to casually answer questions on his YouTube channel about ‘why he uses social media so often’ or ‘whether he is sleeping well.’” He urged the president to “apologize directly to the people who trusted the government and even took on all-in investments by scraping together every last bit of their resources, and announce concrete measures to contain the growing losses suffered by individual investors.”

Mayor Oh added, “Also, disclose every detail so that not a single doubt remains about who decided to increase the National Pension Service’s investment allocation and on what basis, who spearheaded the launch of high-risk leveraged products, and why they rushed to introduce them.” He criticized the government, saying, “Those responsible must be held accountable for the historic crime of turning people’s lives into a testing ground to improve the administration’s report card.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.