Yoon spoke hours after the finance ministry and the BOK announced a second round of support measures to ease strains in its short-term money market, as yields on three-month commercial paper reached a fresh 13-year high on Monday.
The nation’s households are among the world’s most indebted, and some of them are struggling to meet their repayment schedule as mortgage rates hit a decade-high in the mid-4% levels, a recent BOK survey showed. The BOK’s monetary policy committee unanimously agreed to hike interest rates by a quarter-percentage point to 3.25% at its review on Thursday, November 24 – taking the benchmark rate to its highest since 2012. It was a smaller tightening after a half-percentage point increase in October, reflecting a slowdown in inflation to 5.7% in the same month from a near 24-year high reached in July.