A clerk sorts $100 banknotes at the headquarters of Hana Bank in Seoul,Nov. 13. Yonhap

The United States has put South Korea back on its list of countries to monitor for their foreign exchange policies a year after the Asian country's exclusion from the list, a Treasury Department report showed Thursday.

The department released the updated list in the semiannual "Report to Congress on Macroeconomic and Foreign Exchange Policies of Major Trading Partners of the United States." South Korea was excluded from the list in November last year for the first time since April 2016, and was taken off the list again in June.

The latest monitoring list comprises South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and Germany. All except Korea were on the list in the June 2024 report.

U.S. trading partners are put on the list when they meet two of the three criteria set by the U.S. Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, also known as the 2015 Act.

The criteria are a bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. of at least $15 billion, a material current account surplus of at least 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and persistent, one-sided intervention in the foreign currency market for at least eight months during a year and with net purchases totaling at least 2 percent of an economy's GDP over a 12-month period. (Yonhap)