Word: traded
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...least, they were. The economic crisis has hit world trade hard. Ports throughout the world are dramatically less busy than they were just a few months ago; air traffic is way down. Exports from Japan were almost 50% less in February compared with the same month in 2008; China's exports were down 26% in February. The World Trade Organization is predicting global trade will shrink by 9% this year, the steepest annual decline since World War II. This contraction is not only deep, it is also a latter-day rarity: global trade has increased continuously year after year since...
...divine. As households in the rich world, battered by a collapse in the values of their assets, start saving again, their appetite for new cars and consumer electronics has diminished. And as banks try to rebuild their shattered balance sheets, capital that would once have been used to finance trade is staying in their vaults...
...reduced demand and financial flows explain the immediate cause of the downturn in trade, a different - and potentially more damaging - specter looms: the return of protectionism. In a recent report, the World Bank found that although the G-20 nations pledged themselves to avoid protectionist measures when they met in Washington last November, no fewer than 17 of them have, since then, "implemented measures whose effect is to restrict trade at the expense of other countries...
...Zoellick got it just about right. Economic historians will long argue about the relative impact of trade restrictions - led by the U.S. Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 - on the scale of the Great Depression. The U.S. economy was much less integrated into a global economic system then than it is now. But given the retaliation from America's trading partners after the new tariffs were applied, few would argue with Zoellick's assessment that the contraction of trade in the 1930s made the long downturn worse than it needed to be. "Protectionism," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told TIME recently...
...Which raises the question, one that trade economists have to answer every 10 years or so: If protectionism is so ruinous, why does everyone reach for it in tough times? To answer that, you have to go back to why trade is good for you. The idea that an exchange of what you have for what I have makes both of us better off must be as old as the first moment anyone swapped cowrie shells for some cooked fish. Organized trade is ancient: silk did not get to Rome because the Romans figured out sericulture; someone imported it from...