INSIDE VIEW
HILARY JOFFE: Bankers, and others, are learning lessons of the new normal
SA's financial institutions have at shown sophistication and resilience
Late last year I chatted to a couple of investment bank bosses about the way the financial markets had essentially gone home as SA moved into lockdown. Almost overnight, trillions of rands of daily trading in currencies, bonds and equities went to the bedrooms and living rooms of the traders, and those of their supervisors and regulators. And it did so at a time when the markets were going mad, trading unprecedented volumes as panic set in in the face of the pandemic. These are people who were used to sitting in hi-tech dealing rooms with multiple screens, people who weren't even allowed to use their cellphones on the physical trading floor because of the risk of insider trading, or of collusion.
They went home. So too did the JSE, and our central bank, and much of the rest of the financial sector...
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