People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won on Wednesday criticized the scramble for mortgage loans — with borrowers rushing online at dawn before daily lending limits run out — as Lee Jae-myung's "revolution of debt." [Yonhap]
People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won on Wednesday criticized the scramble for mortgage loans — with borrowers rushing online at dawn before daily lending limits run out — as Lee Jae-myung's "revolution of debt." [Yonhap]

People Power Party lawmaker Na Kyung-won on Wednesday criticized the frantic scramble for mortgage loans — with borrowers rushing to secure financing before banks exhaust their daily lending limits — as Lee Jae-myung's "revolution of debt."

In a Facebook post, Na said mortgage loans at an internet bank were fully subscribed within 10 minutes of opening at 6 a.m., adding that "bank loans have become a first-come, first-served ration handed out at dawn." She said the situation had created a "distorted financial market where even top-tier borrowers with a credit score of 950 are turned away like refugees."

"This is the absurd reality produced by the Lee Jae-myung administration's reckless loan regulations," Na said. "Is this what Lee calls a 'revolution of debt'?"

The remark was a pointed jab at the Lee administration's use of the phrase "revolution of light" — a slogan the president has promoted to highlight how citizens defended the constitution and democracy against the Dec. 3 emergency martial law crisis, and under which he established a presidential advisory body by that name. Na recast the phrase, swapping "light" for "debt."

Na went on to criticize the government's cap on household loan growth at 1.5 percent this year as "bureaucratic, government-directed finance," saying it had replaced creditworthiness and repayment capacity with bank-by-bank numerical quotas. "This is not credit assessment — it is rationing by queue," she said.

She warned that once a bank fills its quota and closes its loan window, borrowers are pushed toward savings banks, credit card companies and other higher-cost lenders. "When high-credit borrowers are squeezed into the secondary financial sector, those with mid- or low-credit ratings get pushed even further down, into even riskier financing," she said.

Na acknowledged that managing household debt is necessary, but drew a distinction between management and rationing. She said speculative demand should be filtered out carefully, but that the current policy was wrongly blocking first-time homebuyers who have already signed contracts and are preparing final payments, young people, newlyweds, and those facing imminent moves or jeonse lease expirations.

Na then leveled sharper personal criticism at President Lee and his administration, alleging that Lee had freely borrowed 500 million won ($360,000) at a time from Financial Supervisory Service Governor Lee Chan-jin, and that the buyer of Lee's 2.9 billion won apartment had obtained a mortgage through a backdoor collateral arrangement worth hundreds of millions of won. "They enjoy the privileges of a private financial network among themselves, while squeezing ordinary citizens with loan regulations," she said. "This is 'crony finance' for the powerful."

"The root problem is President Lee Jae-myung's irrational view of finance," Na said. She said the administration's anti-market stance — charging low-credit borrowers lower interest rates and high-credit borrowers higher rates — was bad enough, but that it was now pressuring lenders to write off debts that borrowers themselves cannot repay.

Na urged the government to abandon what she called the "backward practice" of assigning each bank a numerical loan quota. "Politics must stop crushing finance," she said. "We must restore a common-sense credit society and reject a system where the state rations loans like a command economy."


shindw@heraldcorp.com