“It won’t help at all in their global financial hub ambitions,” said Gary Dugan, chief executive officer of the Global CIO Office in Singapore. “A continuously, regularly trading market is an absolute baseline must. Today, they failed the markets and investors.”
The unprecedented outage that scrapped trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the entire day Thursday is the last thing local authorities need at a time when Japan is seeking to reinvent the capital as a global financial hub.
As China clamps down further on Hong Kong, some in Japan have seen the opportunity to realize a long-held vision of making the Japanese capital more attractive to international financial firms and lure highly paid professionals.
Yet Tokyo’s image as an international hub has suffered major setbacks after it came under global criticism over the treatment of former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn while under arrest as well as its ban on almost all foreigners entering the country, including those with valid work visas, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Thursday’s exchange outage isn’t winning points among foreign executives.
