BoK Governor Shin says inflationary pressure looks like it is here to stay, and back-to-back rate hike was necessary to preemptively respond, and needed to act by raising interest rates before inflationary pressures grow further

Says: - USD/KRW market has somewhat stabilised, but is still at a high level. - Recent resurgence in the KRW should help ease import costs, and KRW may strengthen further against USD. - Small to medium sized businesses can access special loan programs by the BoK.

A governor framing consecutive hikes as preemption rather than response is a deliberate hawkish signal: in prior tightening cycles of this kind, that language has tended to indicate the move is part of a sequence rather than a one-off, and it is the committee's stated view of inflation as persistent, not transitory, that determines how much further tightening gets priced. The explicit linkage to the exchange rate is the sharper channel here: the BoK has a long history of treating won weakness as an inflation input via import costs, so comments tying the hikes to FX stabilisation effectively put a floor under the policy stance while the currency remains elevated, and give the KRW an implicit central bank backstop that has on past occasions encouraged inflows and amplified any appreciation. The mention of special loan programs for smaller firms is the standard accompaniment to BoK tightening, an effort to blunt the distributional hit to indebted households and SMEs that has historically constrained how far and how fast the bank can go. The distinction worth drawing is between hikes driven by domestic demand-pull inflation and those driven by the currency: the latter unwind more readily once USD/KRW stabilises, and the governor's remark that the pair has somewhat stabilised but remains at a high level leaves both doors open. The follow-ons are whether the won actually extends its recovery, how import price data evolve, and whether other board members echo the persistence framing at the next meeting. As commentary following action already taken, the signal is that the bar to pausing is higher than the market's base case in comparable episodes.