The common proverb proclaims that when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold. When three of the five largest U.S. banks failed in the span of a week, the panic spread around the world in record time - seemingly proving the proverb as true.

There’s a lot of talk about the $700,000,000,000.00 bailout in the U.S. news. Read that number one more time. Seven. Zero. Zero. Comma. Zero. Zero. Zero. Comma. Zero. Zero. Zero. Comma. Zero. Zero. Zero. Dot. Zero. Zero. I don’t even know the numbers in Korean that count that high to translate for my Korean friends and teachers! 700 trillion won is no small number to comprehend, after all.

An editorial from the Korea Times suggests that the U.S. could learn from Korea’s problems with personal credit card debt from 2000. In both cases, the lenders dropped or ‘forgot’ about their traditional lending standards, giving credit to anyone that wanted it without ensuring they could pay it back. According to the article, one of the programs was a ‘personal debt workout plan’, which helped Koreans pay back their debts and restore their credit status. The American banks failing had more to do with the complex systems of packaging the mortgages and reselling them as ’securities’ - and history will likely remember those packaging deals (and failings) as the primary reason for the recession of 2008.

But how does it affect Korea? Go back to that first sentence: the Korean stock market fell more than 6 percent with the failings of the banks. The won also took a beating - dropping to its lowest level against the US dollar in almost 10 years. The stock market rose based on the possible vote of the bailout plan this morning a little, however. The won is still taking a beating - meaning if you’re looking to come teach in Korea, your U.S. dollar will buy more won now than it would’ve 6 months ago. It also means that if you’re, say, an English teacher living in Korea, it costs you more won to convert your money back into U.S. dollars. The average Korean won’t be buying many things in U.S. dollars, but a weaker currency means it costs more money for businesses to buy raw supplies, import things from other countries, etc. There are many financial experts out there that understand how these things work a lot more, so I’ll leave the rest of the explaining job to them. Let’s just end this post by saying that how the U.S. executes its plan to spend more money than you and I can fathom will assist in determining the world economy for some time to come.