Korean Bank Run Spreading: Eighth Bank Closes Following “Massive Withdrawals”

Korean Bank Run Spreading: Eighth Bank Closes Following “Massive Withdrawals”

Tyler Durden
Zero Hedge
Feb 23, 2011

The quietest bank run that has so far completely evaded mainstream attention, that of Korea, is spreading, and an eighth bank has now shuttered after “Domin Bank, a savings bank with a capital adequacy ratio below 5 percent, voluntarily decided yesterday to suspend its operations temporarily because of massive withdrawals.” As JoongAng reports: “The decision took both depositors and financial regulators by surprise since it was the first time that a local bank shut its doors on its own.” Apparently the courageous decision by the Financial Services Chairman Kim Seok-dong to deposit $17,864 in a troubled bank has not done much if anything to prevent the locals from realizing that their banking system is built on a house of cards.

From JoongAng Daily:

Domin Bank, which has six branches in Gangwon, was placed on a watch list last week by the Financial Services Commission. The move triggered a bank run on Domin Bank.

According to Domin Bank, deposits amounting 31.8 billion won ($28.2 million) were withdrawn since last Thursday, including 18.8 billion won on Monday.

The news of Domin Bank’s temporary closure came as FSC Chairman Kim Seok-dong was visiting Mokpo, South Jeolla, where recently suspended Bohae Savings Bank is located.

Seok-dong unhappy:

“This savings bank was supposed to submit a management improvement plan to the FSC by Feb. 24,” said Kim. “We will now have to review whether [the closure] is even legally O.K.”



Korean Bank Run Spreading: Eighth Bank Closes Following “Massive Withdrawals” 101210banner4

More classic quotes follow:

Bae Joon-soo, senior FSC deputy director, said, “I think it is legally and morally wrong for a financial firm to do such a thing.”

Now we get it: according to the banking cartel’s ethical standard it is “legally and morally wrong” for a bank to admit it is insolvent. Perhaps if America had made this clear 2 years ago, we could have spared ourselves two years of fingerpointing and fictitious lawsuits. After all, say what you will about the tenets of banker national socialism, at least it’s an ethos.

The financial regulator and the Federation of Savings Banks failed to persuade Domin Bank to resume its operation yesterday.

The bank in notices posted on the doors of every branch said that it had taken the move “as a means to soothe the crisis involving massive withdrawals.”

The notice continued, “We will resume operation after we are reborn as a sound savings bank by increasing our paid-in capital to achieve a capital adequacy ratio of 8 percent.”

We repeat our appeal for the FDIC and Treasury to send our crack fraud and book cooking team to guarantee to the Koreans that their bankrupt banks are perfectly ok before this thing gets really out of control, and migrates to China, where a billion man bank run will be a little harder to keep under wraps.