Tim Martin

So this is a completely different picture than certainly...

what maybe the world thinks about North Korea.

And it's even a different picture than people who've been to North Korea many times and hadn't gone in many years.

Just five years ago, Kim Jong-un at a important congressional party meeting had said, I'm sorry, the economy is not working.

Our policy has failed on the economy.

He shed tears in public.

He admitted, in a rare way for a North Korean leader, we have food shortages, we are struggling.

And then right on the heels of this was COVID.

And

North Korea has no, because it's so poor, it doesn't have great public infrastructure.

So anytime there's a pandemic or a broad health scare, they have to shut everything down.

So they closed its borders and that cut off their trade, particularly with China.

And that really asphyxiated the economy.

So even by North Korea's own sort of unique standards of economic vibrancy, they were at a weak point.

And this is where Kim Jong-un was five years ago.

in a shocking way, issuing a mea culpa to his people saying, we're not doing well.

And what we've seen over those five years, it's a bit of luck.

It's a bit of focus.

It's a bit of Kim Jong-un wanting to reassert control over his economy.

But they've had multiple ways to produce this economic rebound.