Pittsburgh's Unfinished Promise Have the G20 OTC derivatives reforms delivered, and what is left for South Africa?

Abstract In September 2009 the G20 committed to central clearing, trade reporting, higher capital and, later, margin requirements for OTC derivatives, in response to the failures exposed by the 2008 crisis. This article asks whether those reforms have delivered. Drawing on Financial Stability Board implementation reports, Bank for International Settlements statistics and South African regulatory publications, it finds that counterparty risk is lower, collateralisation is stronger and supervisors see more of the market than they did in 2008. It also finds that some risk has moved rather than disappeared: into a small number of central counterparties, into margin liquidity demands, across gaps between jurisdictions and into trade data that is hard to aggregate. For South Africa, where regulators expect mandatory clearing of rand interest rate derivatives to be operational by 2028, the article argues that the choice of clearing venue should be settled before the product determination.