•  Distortions were by that time so much embedded in the South African financial structure that the sudden removal of exchange control would not only have exerted pressure on the country’s low level of official foreign exchange reserves, but could also have forced painful immediate structural changes that would have unduly disrupted the domestic economy in the short term.
Jón Steinsson’s intervention on the AEA/PIIE policy panel in January 2022 (Annual Allied Social Science Associations Conference). 2  3  c.f. Schnabel (2022a). 4  c.f. Malmendier and Nagel (2016) and Malmendier et al. (2021) for seminal papers on these behavioral factors.