The Morning Everything Moved at Once

At 8am, late March 2020, my phone started vibrating before my first meeting.

Earlier in the week, sales and trading were still running in person, liquidity was functioning, volatility was rising, and the infrastructure was holding. But the signals had been building for weeks –  oil collapsing after the Saudi-Russia price war broke on 8 March, sterling following by mid-March, FX liquidity evaporating, trade finance lines tightening by late March. By the morning my phone started vibrating, they had all converged into the same problem on the same balance sheets.

I had been watching it. Nothing, however, quite prepares you for the morning it all arrives at once.

Full lockdowns had been announced across Africa, the UK, and Europe. Dealing floors that had operated for decades as centralised risk hubs emptied almost overnight. Sales, trading, structuring, and risk moved to remote execution simultaneously, while volatility accelerated across FX, rates, and commodities. That intersection of market stress and operational transition is what made March 2020 structurally different from 2008. In 2008, we were in the building. In 2020, the building was gone.

The phones were no longer ringing across a trading floor. They were lighting up across distributed home offices. And every call had the same quality of urgency underneath it, even when the voice on the other end was trying hard to sound calm.

The clients calling me that morning each ran different businesses. But they were all sitting on a similar kind of problem.

The calls came from multiple sectors – energy, FMCG/agriculture, telecoms, manufacturing, and petrochemicals. Each faced the same problem: the world they had hedged against, borrowed in, and budgeted for had changed overnight. Revenue streams, debt obligations, and liquidity were under simultaneous stress across multiple currencies and commodities.

None of them needed just more market data. They needed someone to tell them which fire was closest to the building and in what order to move.

I had to build the strategic map that each needed. Those five minutes connected FX exposures, LIBOR reset dates, oil sensitivities, covenant headroom, and trade finance constraints into a single picture. That picture was what I brought to every call that followed.

Pause First. Act Strategically.

In a crisis, the instinct is to act. To be seen responding. To demonstrate urgency. I understand that instinct, I’ve felt it in every volatile market I’ve worked through. But the leaders who performed best in March 2020 did something harder: they paused long enough to ask the right question first.

The right question was not just:

“What is the market doing?”

It was more like:

“What is actually binding us?”

Those are very different questions. The first sends you to Bloomberg or your Global Markets expert. The second sends you to your covenant schedule, your LIBOR reset calendar, your oil sensitivity model, and your trade finance headroom, all the tools used to assess risk exposures across FX, rates, commodities, and liquidity lines. One generates noise. The other generates a sequenced, actionable response.

When I came back to each client call, I didn’t bring a reaction. I brought a structure. For every client, it was a version of the same four questions:

  1. What is your most binding constraint right now?
  2. What can we protect first?
  3. What is the sequence of moves?
  4. What do we not do yet?

That last question is the hardest to hold under pressure. But it’s often the most important. Constraints before instruments. Sequence before trades. That discipline, applied consistently across sectors, currencies, commodities, and geographies, is what turns a liquidity shock into a recoverable event.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”  –  Peter Drucker

In March 2020, the companies that acted with yesterday’s logic were the ones who reacted to FX headlines, mis-timed hedges, and isolated risk measures. The companies that thrived were those that treated FX, interest rate, and commodity exposures as interconnected risks, mapped across balance sheets and jurisdictions, and hedged accordingly.

It’s not about predicting markets. It’s about mapping constraints, sequencing decisions, and executing deliberately across Africa, the UK, and EMEA –  one disciplined call at a time.

Three African Markets, One Global Crisis

I was covering multinational and large corporates who had business across Africa. The same global shock landed very differently in each market, and understanding those differences was the difference between a targeted response and a panicked one.

Nigeria: The Oil Exporter’s Dilemma

Nigeria’s vulnerability in March 2020 wasn’t a surprise. It was a structural dependency that good times had masked. Oil accounts for over 90% of the country’s export earnings. When Brent fell $65 (Jan) – $19 (Apr 21) – 71% collapse, the sovereign FX buffer that held naira stability evaporated with it.

For energy clients in Nigeria, this was the exporter’s dilemma at its sharpest. Dollar revenues had dropped. The naira had moved from ₦370 to over ₦410 against the dollar in the parallel market, whilst the official market was pegged at N365 – a gap that froze dividend repatriation for multinationals across FMCG, telecoms, and energy.

Lesson: Oil dependency is not just a sovereign risk. It is a corporate treasury risk. When your revenue currency and debt currency diverge under the same shock, the covenant clock starts the moment the commodity price moves. Model it before it happens.

South Africa: The High-Beta Currency Under Stress

The rand is one of the world’s most liquid emerging market currencies. In a risk-off environment, that liquidity is a liability. When global institutional investors flee to safety, they sell the rand first because they can. It is the most accessible EM exit at scale.

In March 2020, the ZAR depreciated approximately 25% against the dollar from USD/ZAR R14.40 – R17.95 Mar 23.

What made South Africa especially instructive was the interaction between the currency move and LIBOR spreads. Despite the SARB cutting rates, the all-in cost of floating-rate dollar debt rose — because the LIBOR-OIS spread was spiking simultaneously.

South African multinationals also began repatriating capital from their African subsidiaries during this period. For those subsidiaries, often operating in NGN or frontier currencies, that created a second layer of liquidity pressure on top of the market stress already building locally.

Lesson: Currency liquidity works against you in a risk-off crisis. The more liquid the currency, the faster the institutional exit. Your stress scenario needs to model the speed of the move, not just its magnitude. And your subsidiary cash flows need to be in the same model as your group debt service.

Kenya: The Capex Trap and the Importer Squeeze

Kenya’s experience was no less real for the multinationals operating there. The KES moved from around 100.5 to 106.5 against the dollar, a 6% depreciation that, on its own, looks manageable. The problem was that it didn’t arrive on its own.

EUR and JPY-denominated infrastructure commitments, locked in before COVID, were now being funded from a KES revenue base that was weakening. CFO’s question was not “should we hedge?” It was “what’s our maximum tolerable FX move before this project becomes loss-making, and how close are we?”

Input costs rising in KES terms as the currency moved. Consumer demand collapsed under lockdown. EUR supply contracts sitting against KES, NGN, and ZAR earnings, all under pressure at the same time. Group interest cover ratios at the consolidated level were being tested across three currencies in parallel. That correlation, all three moving against you simultaneously, was what no individual-currency stress test had anticipated.

Lesson: Multi-currency earnings are not natural diversification. If the shock is global, correlated currency moves will stress your group metrics simultaneously. Your scenario model needs to capture that correlation explicitly, not test each currency in isolation.

The Crisis Nobody Was Watching: When Letters of Credit Stopped

There was a fourth dimension to the March 2020 shock that received far less attention than FX, oil, and LIBOR. But for many of my trade-dependent clients, in FMCG, agriculture, and manufacturing, it was the most immediately operational problem. Letters of credit were being rejected. Correspondent banking lines were being pulled. And when those stop, the supply chain stops with them, regardless of what your hedging book looks like.

The Afreximbank-AfDB survey found that thirty percent of African banks reported a substantial increase in LC rejection rates in Q1 2020 compared to the prior year. At small banks, that figure rose to 50%. The primary cause, cited by 59% of respondents, was access to USD liquidity, which had tightened severely as companies hoarded cash, remittances fell, and export volumes collapsed. Across the continent, an estimated $5 billion fled Africa in Q1 2020 alone – $3.1 billion from Southern Africa.

What made this harder was that COVID hadn’t created this vulnerability. It had accelerated something already breaking. International banks, particularly European banks, which accounted for more than 50% of correspondent banking relationship cancellations in Q1 2020, COVID completed the exit for those already partway out the door. Africa’s pre-existing trade finance gap was $91 billion. The crisis was widening in real time.

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

— Andy Grove, Intel CEO

The companies that had diversified their trade finance infrastructure weren’t being paranoid. They were being prepared. The distinction between preparation and paranoia is only visible in hindsight. In the moment, it looks the same.

Lesson: Trade finance is a risk asset. Diversify it the way you diversify your hedging counterparties, before you need it. When the correspondent line is pulled mid-crisis, it is too late to build the alternative relationship.

The UK Dimension: What the BoE’s Emergency Moves Meant for Africa

For UK-listed multinationals with significant African operations, March 2020 arrived with a compounding domestic shock that made the African exposure harder, not easier, to manage.

The Bank of England called two emergency MPC meetings in eight days. Bank Rate fell from 0.75% to 0.25% on 11 March, then to a record low of 0.1% on 19 March, accompanied by £200 billion in additional asset purchases. Those decisions were right. But Sterling didn’t wait for them. GBP/USD fell to $1.15 on 18 March, its sharpest single day move since the Brexit referendum.

For treasury teams at UK-headquartered multinationals, this created a specific problem. The group reporting currency was weakening at the same moment that Africa subsidiary cash flows, in NGN, ZAR, and KES were also under pressure. The translation loss at consolidation compounded the transactional exposure. You couldn’t hedge both sides simultaneously, and the correlation between sterling weakness and EM currency weakness under a global risk-off shock was far higher than most scenario models had assumed.

There was a theoretical cushion, around 75% of FTSE 100 revenues are generated outside the UK, meaning a weaker pound mechanically lifts reported sterling earnings for diversified multinationals. In a domestic UK recession, that cushion is real. In COVID, it wasn’t because demand had collapsed globally. There were no new orders to win. The export competitiveness benefit simply didn’t materialise.

And on 25 March, the BoE and FCA issued a joint statement confirming that LIBOR would still be phased out by the end of 2021, no deferral, despite the crisis. For UK-headquartered banks with African loan books, and for the corporates they were serving, this was an acceleration signal. The LIBOR transition clock was running even as the market seized around it.

Lesson: G7 central bank decisions transmit into Africa through multiple channels at once – not just rates, but currency, credit availability, and regulatory timeline. When the BoE acts under emergency conditions, the African subsidiary feels it before the UK parent does.

What Separated Leadership Outcomes

I saw the full range of responses in those weeks. Some clients made decisions in the first 72 hours that protected them through the shock and positioned them to recover quickly. Others made decisions later. The difference was not access to better information; everyone had the same market data. It was the quality of the framework behind the decisions.

The organisations that led best shared three things.

First, they had already connected their risks before the crisis hit. FX exposure, LIBOR reset dates, oil price sensitivity, covenant headroom, all mapped together, not siloed across treasury, risk, and commercial teams. When the shock came, they didn’t need to assemble the picture. They already had it.

Second, they knew their governance in advance. Who approves a hedging decision under stress? What are the limits when FX and oil move simultaneously? Companies that had answered these questions before March 2020 could act within hours. Companies that hadn’t spent the first week arguing about authority and process, while the market moved against them.

Third, they had built their financial infrastructure before they needed it. Diversified trade finance lines. Regional and DFI banking relationships alongside their international bank lines. Local currency borrowing capacity. When European correspondent lines were pulled, they had alternatives live. When Eurobond markets closed, they had other routes to liquidity.

The Framework: Map → Stabilise → Re-Design

Across all the clients I worked with through this period, the structure that worked followed the same three phases.

Map — First 72 Hours

Before any trade, any hedge, any board call: build the complete picture. FX and rates exposures by currency, tenor, and entity. LIBOR reset calendar against covenant test dates. Oil sensitivity versus the approved budget. Credit and trade finance headroom under stress. The question is not just “what is the market doing?” It is more like “what is the most binding constraint, and how long do we have before it bites?”

Stabilise — First Two Weeks

Protect liquidity and covenant headroom first. Everything else is secondary. This is not the moment to redesign the portfolio. It is the moment to buy time and stop the bleeding. Do not panic-hedge at worst levels. Activate the governance framework you built before the crisis. If you didn’t build one, build it now and move fast. Escalate clearly and consistently,  trading desk to treasury to CFO to board, with the same framing at each level.

Re-Design — One to Three Months

Once you have stabilised, think structurally. Match debt currency to cash-flow currency where possible. Reset hedging thresholds and tenor strategy based on what you just learned. Migrate floating-rate debt to SOFR and alternative reference rates. Strengthen your trade finance infrastructure. Add regional and DFI relationships. Build the cross-asset operating model that would have made the first 72 hours less painful.

The instinct under stress is always to jump straight to Re-Design, to feel like you’re solving the problem at its root. Resist it until you have stabilised. The framework only works if you respect the sequence.

What the Markets Taught Me

March 2020 was the most compressed multi-asset stress event I had worked through. FX, rates, LIBOR, oil, trade finance, and correspondent banking – all of it converging simultaneously, against clients whose exposures spanned across countries in Africa, the UK, EMEA, and beyond. There was no playbook for that exact configuration. There never is.

But here is what I took from it, and what I carry into every advisory conversation I have had since.

The leaders who held their nerve were not the ones with the best market views. They were the ones who knew their constraints so well that they could make one disciplined call after another, even when information was incomplete and the pressure to act immediately was enormous. That clarity doesn’t come from intelligence alone. It comes from preparation – from doing the work of mapping your risks, stress-testing your assumptions, building your governance, and diversifying your financial infrastructure before the crisis asks you to use it.

I think about the clients on those calls. What all of them needed was not a better forecast. They needed someone who had already connected the picture and could tell them, calmly and precisely, where to move first.

That is what Global Markets leadership looks like under pressure. Not the fastest answer. The most prepared one.

What the markets taught me: When FX, Rates, LIBOR, Oil, and trade finance converge across Africa, the UK, and EMEA, leadership is not about predicting markets. It is about knowing your constraints well enough to make one disciplined call after another – and having the governance, the infrastructure, and the sequence already in place when the moment arrives.

QUESTION FOR LEADERS

When FX slides, LIBOR resets, and oil reprices simultaneously – does your team have one integrated framework connecting all three risks to your covenant headroom? Or are three separate conversations happening in parallel, while the clock runs down?

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Lessons from the Markets is a bi-weekly reflection on financial risk, leadership judgment, and decision-making under uncertainty, drawn from nearly two decades of originating, executing, and advising FX, rates, and select commodities solutions for global multinationals and large corporates with Africa-linked FX and interest rate exposures across operations spanning Africa, the UK, and wider EMEA.

Each edition builds on the last – refining frameworks, strengthening judgment, and extracting practical lessons that help leaders navigate cross-border complexity, optimise risk, and turn volatility into strategic advantage.

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The stories and scenarios in this newsletter are composite – drawn from multiple real market experiences across almost two decades. They do not refer to any specific client, transaction, or institution.

Inetina Ebitonmor

Global Markets & Financial Risk Leader | 15+ Years in FX, Rates & Derivatives

Helping global multinationals and large corporates protect margins and preserve capital across African FX and rates cycles – through disciplined risk interpretation and decision-making under uncertainty.

Author, Lessons from the Markets