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Felix Salmon

sailing the rough rude sea

June 15th, 2009

Chart of the day: World trade in recessions

Posted by: Felix Salmon
Tags: felix, ,

Do you like pretty charts comparing this recession to the Great Depression and to other recessions in US history? How about 21 such charts in the same place? Here’s one, from the CFR’s new chartbook. Enjoy!

worldtrade.tiff

5 comments so far

Those are the most amazing charts and Paul Swartz deserves a lot of credit for them.

- Posted by jonathan

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.

- Posted by jonathan

World trade: good riddance to bad rubbish

- Posted by lark

Another spectacularly misleading chart, given the percentage of world trade in previous eras vs. today.

- Posted by Daniel M. Harrison

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.

- Posted by James Kwak

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