Friday 24 December 2010

NORTH KOREA’S THREATS

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ANALYSIS: KOREA THREAT SEEN RHETORIC BUT RISK STILL WATCHED

Peter Apps

Reuters, December 24, 2010

LONDON (Reuters) - Political analysts and local markets may largely write off North Korea's threat of a nuclear "sacred war" as rhetoric, but the risk of conflict on the peninsula has clearly reached the radar of global investors.

North Korea's minister of armed forces accused South Korea of trying to start a war by conducting live fire drills on Thursday, saying Pyongyang was prepared to wage war against its neighbor "at any moment necessary."

While local Korean and Japanese markets have tended to shrug off repeated threats from Pyongyang, partly because of a perceived very low risk of war already priced into assets, wider global investors have begun to take much more notice.

"In terms of rhetoric, this is the sort of thing we've heard before," said Alastair Newton, a former British diplomat and senior Cabinet Office official who is now political analyst for Japanese bank Nomura. "But there's no doubt we are... in the most dangerous situation on the Korean peninsula in decades."

(...) [artículo aquí]

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