World Trade

All you need to read.

How does the current recovery compare to those of the past? The following charts from the Council on Foreign Relations puts the current (un)recovery in context and despite some apparently bright news recently, the pictures underline the economy's weakness since the NBER's recovery began in June 2009.

All you need to read.

But no one was demoted, let alone fired. In fact, many of those who dropped the ball were PROMOTED, just like the knuckleheads who caused the economic crisis were PROMOTED to top posts.

Obama says we should "look forward" instead of prosecuting Wall Street fraud. That guarantees that we will have more economic crises.

Similarly, if we only "look forward" and never look back at unanswered questions, it will ensure more hanky panky in Iraq ... er, Libya ... um, Iran or elsewhere ...

This essay does not question whether Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us on September 11, 2001, or whether Iran, Saudi Arabia or another nation-state had a hand in the attacks. It focuses solely on a peripheral issue regarding the third building which fell on that terrible day

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.