(JoongAng Ilbo) [Ha Hyeon-ok’s Moment by Moment] Their “Secret That Cannot Be Told” (November 5, 2026)

(Pension Future Forum comment:

This column takes the same position as the Pension Future Forum.

Two Naver comments that strike a chord

have been captured and attached as a file.

These are the two comments that strike a chord.

1. "What on earth do they have so much to hide? Please, just disclose it transparently."

2. "Good that an article like this has come out, even this late. What money are institutional investors using to prop up stock prices

and to stop the market from crashing?

Everyone can guess.

Those scoundrels who sold off the future for their own ends

must be punished.")

Country Rankings of Foreign Exchange Reserves No Longer Disclosed
National Pension Minutes Sealed for Four Years
Only Transparency Can Dispel Misunderstanding and Distrust

Secrecy breeds misunderstanding. Once it is suspected of serving to hide an uncomfortable truth, distrust and doubt become unavoidable.

In September, the country rankings of foreign exchange reserves quietly disappeared from the foreign exchange reserves press release that the Bank of Korea publishes every month.

There was no advance notice or explanation. Data that had been published for 25 years and six months, ever since their introduction in February 2001, were suddenly taken out of public view.

When the controversy erupted, the Bank of Korea said it had concluded that the rankings could hardly be regarded as meaningful information on foreign exchange soundness.

It is also true that standards differ from country to country, which makes simple comparison difficult.

As the Bank of Korea explained, since the data are published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others, one can put up with the trouble of looking them up, however inadequate and inconvenient that may be.

Even so, something seems off.

Korea’s foreign exchange reserves, which ranked around ninth in the world at the end of last year, began slipping down the rankings this year.

After placing 10th in January and 12th in February, they fell as low as 13th in May before barely scraping back to 10th in June.

This is seen as the effect of drawing on the reserves to stabilize the value of the won after the won–dollar exchange rate surged early this year.

Foreign exchange reserves are a breakwater against a foreign exchange crisis. In a country where the foreign exchange crisis became a trauma for the entire nation, a fall in this ranking is therefore a sensitive matter.

The last piece of the puzzle, which the feeble excuses had left unsolved, has now fallen into place. According to materials from the parliamentary audit, the Bank of Korea held informal discussions with the Ministry of Finance and Economy about deleting the reserves ranking.

The stated reason for the deletion is that frequent changes in the ranking gave rise to needless disputes divorced from the fundamentals of the national economy. It sounds like an attempt to hide an awkward truth.

As the controversy continued, the Bank of Korea took a step back and made the ranking viewable in its Economic Statistics System. But had the reserves ranking held steady or risen further, would the bank have stopped publishing it?

Another nondisclosure issue is even more heated.

It concerns the minutes of the National Pension Fund Management Committee (the Fund Committee), which will be released in 2030, four years from now.

Under the National Pension Act, ordinary minutes may be released one year after the date of the meeting, while items that could affect the fairness of fund management or the stability of financial markets may be released after four years by a resolution of the committee.

When the competent standing committee of the National Assembly requests them, they must be submitted on a confidential basis, yet the government and the ruling party keep putting off submitting the minutes.

At its January and May meetings, which it has placed under a four-year seal as a “secret that cannot be told,” the Fund Committee decided to suspend the rebalancing (readjustment) of domestic equities and to raise the target weight of domestic equities.

Not content with effectively declaring a “selling moratorium” through the end of June at the January meeting, it sharply raised the target weight of domestic equities in May.

Taking into account the permitted range of strategic asset allocation and the range of tactical asset allocation, the target weight of domestic equities rose from 19.9% to as much as 28.8%.

As it happens, local elections were held that very June.

The National Pension’s asset allocation principles were substantially revised, yet the grounds for the investment judgment and the reasoning that would support the soundness of the decision stayed hidden behind a veil.

There was only a sweeping publicity campaign by the President and the government claiming that the rise in the valuation of equity holdings, on the back of the soaring index, had pushed back the date of pension fund depletion.

Since July, however, as the domestic stock market has corrected, the losses of the National Pension, which had increased its share of domestic equities, have snowballed.

By the opposition’s account, losses on a valuation basis amount to at least 182 trillion won.

The National Pension, the people’s retirement asset, is money paid in by its contributors.

It is not money the government and the ruling party may spend as they please.

If they keep the minutes hidden and offer nothing but explanations and excuses, the suspicion that the National Pension was used politically to prop up the stock market ahead of the local elections can only harden into certainty.

The way to avoid misunderstanding and distrust is to unseal the minutes and transparently disclose the full story of the rebalancing moratorium.

They hold up transparent governance as their banner, livestream Cabinet meetings, and pour out social media posts that lay bare the President’s every thought, yet they keep under wraps precisely what the public wants to know. This yawning gap is hard to accept.

One has to wonder whether their “secret that cannot be told” really involves something they cannot tell.

Ha Hyeon-ok, Editorial Writer