Fragmented markets shrug off global seizures

London

A TRADING shutdown across Chinese markets, a multi-hour outage at the NYSE and the financial quarantine of Greece sound like the plot of a summer disaster movie. Yet their collision this week left only a flesh wound.

For a post-crisis market structure that is frequently lambasted by investors as fragmented and vulnerable to a global liquidity shock, this is no mean feat. Global equities are down just one per cent this week, with little sign of worldwide systemic spillover from US technical glitches or wild swings in China. And more broadly, despite a pickup in volatility on bond, currency and equity markets, major benchmark indexes have kept within a fairly narrow trading range.