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Global Recession Around the Corner?

This is a speculative article. If I could get it right every time I would be more than comfortably well off.  However, there are some really worrying events in the pipeline.

Global industrial production is continuing to fall:

CPB World Trade Monitor
The Baltic Dry Index (shipping movements) has fallen off a cliff, this is really disturbing and often presages serious trouble:

The Chinese have just admitted that Covid virus spread is probably (briefly) out of control:

The Chinese economy is in trouble for obvious reasons:

Chinese coal consumption

 The German economy is in deep trouble:

Bloomberg
The EU is in trouble:

Eurostat
There is clearly a global slowdown, the only questions are "how deep and how long?". The covid-19 virus outbreak has come at a bad time so all bets are off.

The knock-on effects of the Chinese slowdown are interesting.  Commodities that China consumes are falling in price whilst those it supplies and "safe havens"/substitutes are rising:

See Seeking Alpha. StuartBurns
All of this shows that the utterly unnecessary total globalisation of the world economy is as dangerous as it has ever been and must be rolled back.  No-one should forget that after world trade plummeted in 1929, as a result of rampant internationalisation of trade, domestic production took up the slack in the 1930s onwards and created GDP growth that matched or even exceeded the growth that had occurred when global trading was dominant.  Rampant Internationalisation is unstable.  Moderate global trade is good, rampant global trade is obviously a mistake.


Growth in global trade must not be confused with prosperity. There was no huge uptick in our prosperity between 1970 and 2008 when global trade rocketed (see graph above), all that happened is that some goods that we used to make domestically came from abroad and those we used to sell solely domestically we sold abroad.  The growth in global trade simply put production and power into the hands of Multinational Corporations.

Statista
I read the FT, Economist and business pages but understand that they are largely on the side of Multinational Companies and Banks not on our side. They all lie about the 1929 slump, saying that it was due to protectionism when in fact it was due to an unstable global economic system that caused havoc and was replaced by buoyant and stable domestic production with moderate international trade.

You cannot be an environmentalist and support rampant global trade, you cannot be a democrat and support the removal of control of the economy from Nations. 

See Global trade - Globalisation - Internationalism

13/2/2020







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