•  During the long extended period of exchange controls, backlogs developed, and a huge pent-up demand for an outflow of capital emerged. Overdue loans had to be repaid to non-residents, and no South African residents were allowed to accumulate foreign assets of any significance over a period of more than thirty years.
•  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.