President Lee Myung-bak called Monday for concerted efforts to curb rising consumer prices, instructing aides to set up a prices-monitoring team and to make the issue a fixture on the agenda for weekly meetings of senior secretaries, his spokesman said.

“The most important thing for our government is the issues of prices and jobs. We have to tighten the rein on prices,” Lee told a meeting of senior secretaries, according to presidential spokesman Park Jeong-ha. “We have to deal with the issue with a sense of tension.”

Lee ordered the establishment of a special task force team at the office of his chief economic secretary that checks movements in prices in markets and other real-life fields every day, according to the spokesman.

Lee also instructed aides to convene a meeting of related Cabinet ministers at an early date this week, saying he would preside over the meeting, and ordered that the issue of prices be tabled at a weekly meeting of senior secretaries, Park said.

South Korea’s consumer price index surged 4.4 percent last month from a year earlier, quickening from the previous month’s 4.1 percent gain. June marks the sixth straight month that consumer prices have jumped above the government’s renewed annual inflation target of 4 percent for this year. 

(Yonhap News)