For all the market dislocation caused by Donald Trump’s trade war over the past two weeks, things could have been much worse. Ironically, investors — and the Trump administration — may need to thank one of the president’s longtime bogeymen: former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler.
Despite violent swings in asset prices and record trading volumes, there have been few reports of the sort of serious liquidity problems in equity markets that accompanied previous bouts of volatility. Traders say this was in part due to an important change to the back-end of US markets that took effect last year — the shift to so-called T+1 settlement.
