Japan versus South Korea: Asia’s other trade war

Decades of bickering between South Korea and Japan are feeding an increasingly nasty trade dispute.

Seoul's Myeong-Dong district at night © Alamy

Korean equities look "screamimgly cheap"
(Image credit: Seoul's Myeong-Dong district at night © Alamy)

"Decades of bickering" between South Korea and Japan are feeding an increasingly nasty trade dispute, says The Economist. In August, Tokyo removed its neighbour from a "White List" of trusted export destinations, prompting Seoul to respond in kind. South Korea's chipmakers rely on imports of chemicals from Japan, but Tokyo is "signalling that it could at any moment cripple" Korea's biggest industry, a "wildly aggressive, disproportionate threat".

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.