How Is Social Mood Bringing Korea Together?

After years of tension between North and South Korea, things appear to be thawing, ironically, on the ice.

The nations agreed last week to create a joint North and South Korean women's ice hockey team for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. This will be the first unified team for the two countries since they joined together for an international table-tennis championship and a youth soccer match in 1991.

North and South Korea will march together under one flag at the Olympic Games.

So why is there a new hope for cooperation on the Korean peninsula?

Mark Galasiewski, Elliott Wave International's (www.elliottwave.com) chief strategist for Asia and emerging markets, says one contributor is a shift toward positive social mood in the region, which is also reflected in Asia's soaring stock markets.

"North Korea’s offering of an olive branch—and a women’s ice hockey team—to South Korea reflects the peak positive mood in Asia at the current time,” says Galasiewski.

Galasiewski says it represents the polar opposite of the mood in the region just two years ago, when North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb to kick off a long campaign of weapons tests and violent rhetoric. That event occurred just a few weeks prior to the end of the 2014-2016 financial crisis in emerging markets.

“The current détente has occurred following the largest stock market advance in Asia since 2009 — a 75 percent gain in less than two years,” he says. “The joint Olympic team and the boom in the stock market are both symptoms of the elevated social mood."

About Mark Galasiewski

Mark Galasiewski (gala-SHEV-ski) is chief strategist for Asia and Emerging Markets at Elliott Wave International (www.elliottwave.com) and a contributing author to the recent book Socionomic Causality in Politics, a #1 Amazon new release in behavioral psychology. After joining the firm in 2005, Mark wrote essays for TheElliott Wave Theorist which correctly forecasted the global financial crisis. Since 2008, he has covered Asia and Emerging Markets for the monthly publicationsGlobal Market Perspective and The Elliott Wave Asian-Pacific Financial Forecast. He has appeared on major media outlets such as CNBC, Barron’s, Bloomberg TV Asia, China Central Television, CNBC TV-18, Bloomberg TV India, ET NOW, Press Trust India, Dow Jones Asia newswire and Minyanville. A graduate of Middlebury College in East Asian Studies, he is fluent in Japanese and conversant in Mandarin Chinese.