Oh Se-hoon: “Stock-market gambling for local elections ... President Lee Jae Myung must apologize to the public”

[Financial News] Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul, criticized the Lee Jae-myung administration’s policies to prop up the stock market amid the recent sharp drop in domestic stocks, calling them “stock-market gambling for local elections,” and urged the president to apologize personally and devise measures to address individual investors’ losses.
Oh said he posted a message on Facebook on the 8th titled “Stock-Market Gambling for Local Elections—Stop Evading Responsibility,” claiming, “It has turned into a massive gambling operation in which the government used the National Pension Service as seed money to raise the stakes and paved the way for them to grow further through high-risk leveraged products.”
He referred to the situation on the 6th, when the KOSPI fell below the 5,000 mark just three minutes after the market opened and a circuit breaker was triggered. A circuit breaker is a mechanism that temporarily halts market trading when a stock index falls sharply by a specified amount or more.
Oh said that circuit breakers had been triggered 11 times this year on the KOSPI Market, noting that nine of those cases were concentrated in just five months, from June—immediately after the local elections—through last week.
He went on to ask, “Before the election, stock prices soared to an almost unbelievable degree, but since the election they have continued to plunge. Could all of this really be a coincidence?”
Oh took particular issue with the increase in the National Pension Service’s allocation to domestic stocks just before the local elections. He said that on May 28 the government raised the NPS’s target allocation to domestic stocks from 14.9% to 20.8%, criticizing it for “making even the NPS, which is responsible for the public’s retirement, serve as a pillar propping up the stock market.”
He also criticized the approval of high-risk leveraged products. Oh said, “On May 27, just one week before the local elections, the government approved the launch of products that track twice the daily percentage changes in the share prices of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix,” calling them “products with extremely high speculative risk.”
He added, “The administration took the lead in fueling the illusion of rising stock prices, and people staked their assets on that illusion,” saying, “The Lee Jae-myung administration’s perilous arrogance in believing it could move the market at will ultimately opened the gates of hell.”
Oh urged President Lee to “apologize directly to the people who trusted the government and even went so far as to borrow heavily to invest, and announce concrete measures to contain the spread of losses among individual investors.”
He also demanded disclosure of who decided to increase the NPS’s allocation to domestic stocks and approve the launch of high-risk leveraged products, and what judgment those decisions were based on.
Oh also stressed that those responsible “must be held accountable for the historic crime of turning people’s lives into subjects of an experiment for the sake of the administration’s report card.”
[email protected] Seong Cho-rong Reporter