Charting The Great World Trade Collapse

A new report by VoxEU provides some detailed perspectives on just how bad the collapse in world trade has been as a result of the last year's events. In a nutshell: the current Great Recession/Depression has plunged the world into an unprecedented collapse of global trade, with the resultant blowing of liquidity bubbles having been the only way for individual governments to respond to this massive loss of GDP. And while drops in world trade are nothing new, with a 5% drop in the 1982 and 2001 periods, as well as a more severe 11% contraction in the 1970s, the current plunge of over 15% YoY is truly unprecedented and demonstrates the fragile nature of "globalization." What the outcome of this fact will be, depends entirely on the traditional dynamo of world economic growth - the US consumer, and unfortunately he is still down for the count. (more)