Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the South African Reserve Bank. We thank you for being here this evening, and we feel honoured that you should have accepted our invitation. As most of you are engaged in the foreign exchange markets, we thought that it might be useful to make a few remarks on our involvement in the markets and refer to recent developments in this regard. We think that you are an important and critical constituency as far as our work is concerned, and it is only correct and proper that from time to time we should come together to exchange views and interact with one another. Allow me to congratulate ACI South Africa for being selected to host the ACI Council Meeting in Sandton from the 23rd to 27th November this year. It will be the first time that this prestigious event will be held in South Africa. We wish you good luck with the organisation of that event and we are certain that you will do us proud! We have also noted from your website that you are also taking this opportunity to draw attention to the “sights and sounds” of our beautiful country. We are also aware of the important role, which the ACI is playing in actively promoting the educational and professional interests of the financial markets. In particular, the active role in the education of dealers with a view to establishing an accreditation standard and developing the technical skills and knowledge of financial market dealers in South Africa and Africa as a whole is to be appreciated. It is assumed here that as an organisation you are also an active participant in the financial services charter process.  We also admire your efforts in compelling your members to maintain the professional level of competence and the ethical best practices of loyalty as set out in your Model Code. We strongly support all your attempts to promote professional and ethical behaviour in South Africa as these are essential in building credible international trading relations, and in establishing, maintaining and enhancing the reputation of our financial markets. Our remarks this evening will focus on developments in the foreign exchange markets during the last couple of years. A good starting point appears to be the last time we met with you as an organisation here at the central bank. WHAT WERE THE BIG ISSUES AT THE TIME OF THE LAST ACI COCKTAIL?   Just to touch on a few issues: If my memory serves me well, we met in May 2001, at a time when the currency markets were dominated by a strong US$ on the back of strong flows into the USA, although at the time the strong economic growth seen in 2000 was already giving way to a somewhat less favourable growth prospect in the USA. We were all surprised that the US$ was still showing some resilience and continued to be generally strong. As we all now know, things did not stay that way. In the year 2000, the Rand lost 22% of its value against the US$ and during the first five months of 2001 the Rand lost about 5.5% against the US$, which did not seem too strange based on economic fundamentals at the time. Little did we know, of course, that at the end of the year 2001 we would be talking about a 37% depreciation and that there would have been the attacks on the United States, which would precipitate more conflicts and wars, and change risk perceptions in financial markets. We talked then about volatility in the financial markets and acknowledged that it was becoming a constant feature as the processes of deregulation, liberalisation and globalisation continued to gather momentum. Trading in our foreign exchange markets and in the Rand was very much influenced by the existence of the NOFP and the Forward Book, with the NOFP still registering a negative balance of US$9bn, in spite of significant progress that had been made in reducing it from the precarious levels of over US$23bn in 1998. This was seen as a negative factor by rating agencies and investors, and we were constantly called upon to explain how we were going to deal with that situation. WHERE DID THE JOURNEY TAKE US AFTER THAT? As you all know, the period after our