In the spring of 2013, the Kim Jong Un regime unilaterally withdrew the 50,000-plus of its citizens then working for firms in the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC). The withdrawal is said to have prompted an angry Jang Song Thaek to press his wife, Kim Jong Un’s aunt Kim Kyung Hui, to use her authority to have the leader reverse his decision. We don’t know whether the story is true; it may be apocryphal. Nevertheless Jang, we can surmise, was well-aware of the scarcity value of hard currency and its importance to his plans for the North Korean economy. Just six months earlier, the Chinese government had rebuffed his request for a billion U.S. dollars in financial assistance.

Despite Jang’s entreaties, the Kaesong shutdown lasted from April until September. During this period, the North Korean market responded in two identifiable ways. First, a local firm began to produce an imitation – a pale imitation, by all accounts, but nevertheless an imitation – of the Choco Pies made by Orion that KIC workers had been receiving daily from their employers in the complex; and second, the price of authentic Choco Pies rose dramatically in markets beyond the complex. The two responses are of course closely interlinked.