The Buy Korea craze didn't die down easily. If anything, it carried through into a broader fund craze that breathed life back into a dying stock market.

Until then, ordinary people had regarded the stock market as little better than a gambling den. Trading floors thick with cigarette smoke conjured a gloomy atmosphere, and with families ruined by stock losses, people had come to think of stocks, alongside horse racing, as a form of gambling. And, to be fair, the actual movements of the market hadn't been so different from a gambling table — rising on some strange rumor, falling for a perfectly sound company, a place where rational judgment matched nothing. On top of that, with countless companies collapsing in the foreign-exchange crisis and invested money vanishing into thin air, the stock market had lost even the scant trust people once held for it.

That stock market began to change because of the Buy Korea fund. The advantages drew people in: you didn't have to invest yourself, you could pay in whenever you liked, like a savings deposit, the fund's returns were disclosed transparently, and you could redeem whenever you wished. And on top of that, the sense that investing in the stock market could save companies, create jobs, and save the Republic of Korea gave the market new vigor. Under this change, the stock market — which had been lying in intensive care on a ventilator, stuck in the 200s — began, little by little, to come back to life. And as the stock market revived, the Buy Korea fund's returns began to move as well.

Executive Director Mun-guk Oh, in charge of the Buy Korea fund, reported to Seong-ho.

"Last week's fund return was 0.3%. We newly executed 520 billion won, with 420 billion flowing into the fund and 27 billion flowing out. On a weekly basis, net inflow is still ongoing. It looks as though this trend will continue through the end of the year."

Seong-ho nodded and looked at the paper Mun-guk Oh handed him. On it was written detailed content relating to the Buy…