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A daily market brief, published each morning. Markets, stocks, industry, economy, global, and policy — sorted by category.

Policy·2026-07-10

Regulators Weigh Delisting, Trading Halts Among Options for Leveraged ETFs

Financial authorities officially denied a leaked Yeouido-sourced leveraged ETF regulation plan (covering higher deposit requirements, mandatory investor education, and daily price-swing caps) as baseless, while reaffirming they would comprehensively analyze the causes of market volatility and seek measures to minimize investor harm. Policy Chief Kim Yong-beom subsequently said the system would be improved if needed, confirming the issue would be discussed at the F4 meeting (finance ministry, financial regulator, central bank, and financial supervisory service), with the Financial Services Commission's July 15 presidential briefing seen as a likely turning point. Market participants floated delisting, tighter eligibility limited to professional investors, and higher margin requirements as possible remedies, though concerns persisted that any concrete action would take considerable time to materialize.

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Policy·2026-07-09

Policy chief Kim Yong-beom signals nuclear expansion; regulators probe front-running

Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said new nuclear plants should be built wherever local communities want them, adding that use of LNG cogeneration is also under discussion with industry. This was read as confirming that nuclear power and large-scale semiconductor mega-projects are effectively being pursued as a package given expected power demand. The Financial Supervisory Service's capital markets special judicial police uncovered suspected front-running by staff at an economic broadcaster and conducted a raid. Staff are suspected of buying roughly 300 stocks ahead of undisclosed positive coverage and selling after the news moved prices, with the amount involved estimated at around 1 billion won. President Lee Jae-myung posted on social media that capital market fairness cannot be compromised and that stock manipulation will always be caught by the triple net of the FSS, police and prosecutors.

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Policy·2026-07-08

Rep. Lee Hae-min on the Three-Pillar AI Megaproject and Power-Policy Fights

Rep. Lee Hae-min welcomed the government's decision to expand its megaproject beyond memory chips to also cover AI data centers and physical AI. She explained that when Nvidia's Jensen Huang visited Korea, he met not just memory makers but cloud, robotics, and gaming companies too — a sign of a strategy to keep generating new demand (cloud subscriptions, data centers, physical AI) ahead of any plateau in chip demand. With Asia still lacking an AI data-center hub and roughly 1,000 trillion won in pending demand, she said stable power supply and rate terms are the key to Korea winning that business. She noted that special utility-rate and power purchase agreement (PPA) provisions were stripped from her own AI data-center special bill before it passed the assembly — yet the government later separately announced plans to introduce a dedicated utility rate, a contradiction she has formally demanded the ministry explain in writing. She described PPAs as direct deals between power generators and consumers that bypass the transmission grid — necessary because waiting for new transmission lines to be built risks losing time-sensitive demand. On criticism that competition among localities for the project has become politicized, she countered that government's job is to build the national infrastructure that lets companies choose freely, with the final siting decision resting with the companies themselves. Citing Taiwan's full-throttle government support for TSMC's new fab, she argued Korea needs a similar approach — while stressing the goal is to build an environment any company could enter, not favors for one firm. Noting that a large share of papers and booths at the ICML conference currently underway in Korea are Chinese, she warned that China's rapidly strengthening AI fundamentals are both a threat to Korea's megaproject and, potentially, a new source of chip demand.

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