The government kicked off an in-depth analysis of the overseas operations of domestic financial firms in preparation for a possible retaliatory attack by the United States on Afghanistan. A high-ranking official at the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) said Sunday that, if the US carries out the attack, the global financial market will undergo a serious squeeze, and, as a result, Korean financial firms will have difficulties in rolling over maturing loans overseas. He said that his watchdog agency ordered the financial companies to beef up their monitoring on the liquidity situation abroad.

The same FSS official explained that the government authorities in charge have set up contingency plans to cope with possible global financial crisis. FSS said it has been closely watching Bahrain-based branches of the Korea Exchange Bank and Hanvit Bank as the branches could easily be affected by a US retaliatory attack in the Middle East.

(Park Jong-sae, jspark@chosun.com )