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Those are the most amazing charts and Paul Swartz deserves a lot of credit for them.
Forgot to mention my favorite chart is the one that shows how the cost of funds has lowered. It’s kind of amazingly flat because this mess wasn’t preceded by a runup in interest rates and thus we can’t see the desperation in the moves by the Fed. I stared at that chart and thought, “Gee, one lesson is that if you’d raised rates before, it would like you’d have accomplished more now.” It’s a perverse world.
World trade: good riddance to bad rubbish
Another spectacularly misleading chart, given the percentage of world trade in previous eras vs. today.
Daniel – Those are YoY percentage changes, so the total volume of world trade doesn’t matter. At least not on the first order. It’s not as if the Y-axis is in dollars, in which case your point would be very valid.
Felix – My apologies. I posted the exact same chart last night (well after you did), but at the time I didn’t realize you had done it first.