South Korea's Ministry of Strategy and Finance said Tuesday that it will continue studying ways to reduce the economic risk posed by rapid capital flows in and out of the country, as growing concerns about the euro zone stoke fear of another global economic shock, The Wall Street Journal reported. Vice Finance Minister Shin Je-yoon said at a briefing Monday that the bond market and interbank lending market are two key areas for additional policy consideration.

The “Buffett tax” will affect very few this year as just 0.17 percent of taxpayers reported in 2010 that they made enough to be affected by the newly-introduced highest rate, the tax agency said Tuesday, The Korea Times reported. The National Assembly passed a revised bill last week that allows a collected 38-percent tax rate from those who earn 300 million won ($270,000) or more annually. It has been dubbed the Buffett tax after Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, who suggested the U.S. government raise the tax rate of rich people like him.

A savings bank undergoing a normalization plan was found to have extended loans to applicants using borrowed names, the financial watchdog said Monday, The Korea Times reported. As the grace period for six secondary lenders that survived the government’s mass suspension in September last year and have pushed for normalization ended last month, the financial authorities are expected to shortly come up with a clearing list. There are growing concerns that the fallout of last year’s savings bank scandal that hit domestic financial markets hard is likely to continue in the new year.

How bad is the debt problem in South Korea? There are some new numbers that provide clues, The Wall Street Journal Korea Real Time blog reported. More than 1 million Koreans, or about 4% of the economically-active population of 25 million, once joined in or are currently working with personal debt workout programs, the Credit Counseling & Recovery Service says. The non-profit agency started the program called “Personal Workout” in October 2002 in order to help people resolve their debt problems and regain their credit.

Households are sinking under a sea of debt and threaten to take the country’s fragile economy down with them. Policymakers are rightfully alarmed, but their scrambling appears to be pushing families further into the abyss rather than keeping them afloat, The Korea Times reported in a commentary. Under enormous pressure to navigate the country out of this mess, officials at the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and Bank of Korea (BOK) are trying their hardest to put on brave faces and claim the current levels of indebtedness are broadly manageable.

Listed small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggled with cash shortages in the first half of this year amid the faltering economic recovery, a non-profit organization said Monday. The nation’s top-10 business groups added more cash to their wallets during the same period, The Korea Times reported. According to the Korea Listed Companies Association (KLCA), the cashable assets of Korea’s 632 listed companies stood at 48.13 trillion won ($40.76 billion) as of the end of June, compared with 52.94 trillion won at the end of last year, a 7.6 percent contraction.

Financial regulators' decision to close seven troubled savings banks earlier this week spawned dramatic scenes of angry depositors outside locked branch offices and, on Friday, the suicide of an executive at one of the closed-down institutions, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The savings-bank industry, with just over 100 institutions and 2.4% of the nation's financial assets, is a small niche in South Korea's financial industry.

Financial companies saw their number of delinquent customers increase by nearly 200,000 this year as more people struggle to repay debt amid the alarming deterioration of family finances, The Korea Times reported. The default rates for households approved by commercial banks have surpassed the level shown during recent financial crises, and an increasing number of small- and medium-sized companies are sinking under a sea of red, industry figures show.

Financial authorities have vowed to throw everything they have at the country’s consumer debt mountain, which now threatens to outstrip an entire year’s gross domestic product (GDP). But to the majority of observers, it appears the officials are doing nothing at all, if not actually making things worse, The Korea Times reported. It was two months ago when the Financial Services Commission (FSC) announced a fresh set of measures to tackle the increasing problem of personal indebtedness, aimed at assisting households in repaying loans and suppressing irresponsible lending by banks.

Korea’s increasingly toxic housing market is now threatening to wipe out the cream of the crop in its construction industry, a private think-tank claims. High on the endangered list are builders like Daewoo, Lotte, Ssangyong, Halla, Kolon and Keangnam, The Korea Times reported.