In South Korea, the term byeorak-geoji means “sudden beggar.” In 2026, it has gained widespread popularity again. But its meaning is figurative. Rather than denoting sudden bankruptcy or losing one’s life savings in the stock market, the term describes a new and widespread sense of relative deprivation: The realization that a colleague or acquaintance just earned years of your salary in a single month on paper.

Such anxiety is driven by a booming domestic semiconductor industry that has a stranglehold on the global artificial intelligence industry’s supply bottleneck: memory chips. At the market’s peak this year, Samsung Electronics saw its market capitalization surge to a record high of $1.3 trillion, while SK Hynix has since reported a staggering 328 percent year-on-year increase in revenue in its latest third-quarter results. The boom had led many Koreans to believe that borrowing to leverage into these companies offered the quickest and perhaps the only route to profits large enough to pay off their mortgages and secure homes.

If you were an engineer at one of these companies, you could cash out stock compensation boosted by stock rallies fueled by people’s borrowing, collect enormous bonuses, and secure a mortgage rate of 1.5 percent through company housing-loan programs, alongside support for your children’s tuition and retirement savings. Meanwhile, ordinary Koreans carrying debt and buying homes are left to shoulder the Bank of Korea’s high-interest-rate campaign, with back-to-back rate hikes in July and August, designed to curb inflation and financial risks amid the national semiconductor export boom.

Koreans are increasingly questioning that boom’s broader effect on ordinary households. Economists and scholars are voicing doubts. Even as semiconductors have accounted for nearly half of South Korea’s exports and pushed nominal GDP growth to a nearly 50-year high, the Korea Development Institute slashed its annual job growth forecast from 170,000 to 110,000 in its August report, and the OECD projected the country’s private consumption growth for the year at just 2.2 percent. And if the semiconductor boom eventually bursts, the overall effects for the Korean economy could be devastating.

If the global demand for memory falters, new capacity floods the market, or technological advances curb AI’s appetite for memory, the result would inevitably be a price fall. That would be welcome for buyers such as U.S. tech giants, AI powers, and behemoth enterprises such as Apple. Meanwhile, Samsung and SK Hynix would undoubtedly take a severe hit, although the massive net cash reserves they have amassed will shield them from the kind of bankruptcies that decimated debt-fueled South Korean chaebols during the late-1990s Asian financial crisis.

But while Korea’s memory industry sits on deep liquidity buffers, the true burden of debt in 2026 rests squarely on the shoulders of the country’s households. As an acutely capital-intensive industry, the semiconductor sector’s colossal profits are effectively locked away at the apex of the corporate hierarchy. This classic dual economy structure ensures that wealth fails to permeate adequately through trickle-down effects to the small- and medium-sized enterprises and the service sector, which account for the absolute majority of national employment.

Meanwhile, the South Korean populace has been left to bear the brunt of emerging macroeconomic overheating and inflation. According to the Bank of Korea, household credit breached 2,000 trillion won ($1.49 trillion) in June, and it had already stood at 88.6 percent of GDP at the end of 2025. The onerous mortgage and credit interest burdens induced by the rate hikes are stifling private consumption.

What’s worse, South Korea suffers from one of the highest house price-to-income ratios globally, with ordinary citizens anchoring their massive debt to the real estate market, itself strained by property project-finance troubles. Yet the world’s lowest fertility rate, coupled with rapid demographic aging, leaves a shrinking young generation to absorb these real estate assets, eroding the foundations of domestic demand. And AI, of course, cannot resolve the low fertility rate.

The current prosperity carries the seeds of so-called Dutch disease, in which a booming export sector siphons capital and talent away from other industries and erodes their competitiveness. The result is a hollowing out of the foundations of the domestic economy.

Memory export figures act as a tarp draped over the nation’s roof, temporarily covering the reality of high inflation and weak private consumption. According to OECD projections, South Korea’s potential growth rate will be at a historic low of 1.52 percent in 2027, a figure even lower than the 2.52 percent recorded in 2023, before the memory boom. Fundamentally, South Korea’s 2026 growth is jobless growth. Beneath the tarp of an export boom, the ceiling of its domestic market is caving in while the foundation of its economy continues to erode.

Nowadays, another term is circulating widely among the South Korean populace: yeongkkul, which refers to “trading one’s soul to borrow.” Just as, amid the 19th-century cotton boom, Indian farmers famously surrendered their subsistence fields to chase cotton margins, modern South Koreans are seeking leverage of any kind to outrun the debt, inflation, and housing prices inflated by the memory boom.

One 25-year-old student interviewed by a South Korean news website diverted a student loan meant for living into stocks. Then he added an emergency bank loan and his part-time earnings to pour about 22 million won borrowed money into leveraged stock-market funds. Another student, aged 24, used fivefold leverage to turn 20 million won saved during military service into nearly 300 million won, only for forced liquidations to wipe out his gains and eat into his original savings within weeks. But he planned to borrow again, still hoping one day to afford an apartment, marriage, and children.

In investing, people resort to excessive leverage because of a fear of missing out. In the context of South Korea’s post-pandemic K-shaped recovery, the anxiety runs deeper: It is a fear of failing to scale a calcified social ladder, of being discarded by the velocity of wealth redistribution. People see their hard work rewarded with a salary that must be saved in its entirety for more than 30 years, without spending a penny on living expenses, to afford to buy an apartment in Seoul. They see a future in which their bosses—whose assets have made them the major beneficiaries of the semiconductor boom—replace them with AI.

The result is not just a fear of missing out on gains, but of missing out on a normal life—a fear of falling behind. Koreans are incapable of outrunning omnipresent economic anxiety and existential dread. A constant sampling is on offer on the anonymous digital platform Blind, where it’s common to read comments such as: “In a society where class divisions are entrenched, the ladder to climb has collapsed”; or “you have to bet your life on leverage”; or “If we miss out on AI boom, is it already too late for us in this lifetime?”

Extreme economic structures are accompanied by extreme risks. Whether AI will transform the world, and whether Asia has overconcentrated its resources in it, are two distinct questions. Just as in Bombay amid the cotton boom of the mid-19th century, the macroeconomic buffers of South Korea’s single-engine semiconductor economy are wearing thin. If the solitary engine of memory stalls, its effects could compound the risks from household debt, real estate vulnerabilities, and demographic pressures to deluge the entire South Korean economy and its population.

The central question of the memory cycle is not about whether it will end, but when. On the optimistic side, if the global memory shortage persists beyond 2030, as projected by SK Hynix’s CEO, South Korea’s economy and its semiconductor companies will usher in a golden age, alleviating the government’s chronic deficit pressures.

Yet a meager trickle of prosperity coupled with persistent jobless growth could potentially spell even deeper despair for ordinary people. Waiting in vain for a trickle that may never come, the people would be left to languish in a continuing drought.

A delayed fallout could be worst of all for most Koreans. The future currently portends a household debt bubble, a weakened domestic demand buffer, and a demographic cliff—ingredients for an economic famine. A memory downturn would depress incomes and asset prices, forcing indebted households to cut spending; spending cuts would deepen a property market downturn and systemic financial distress, ensuring the protracted slump.

Like 1990s Japan, South Korea risks its own “lost decade.” History has demonstrated that for an economy overdependent on a monoculture, the longer that the prosperity overshadows the decay it breeds, the harder the prolonged landing. In boom and bust alike, ordinary Koreans pay the highest price.