Far Eastern Economic Review, 6 Mar 2009, Mark Thirlwell
If 2008 was the year of the global financial crisis, 2009 is turning out to be the year of the real economy fallout: a case of Après Lehman, le déluge. It now seems almost unavoidable that 2009 will see the world economy contract in real terms, producing the worst performance for global growth since World War II. International trade and capital flows have been falling so precipitously that deglobalization is threatening to replace globalization as the best description of our current international economic environment. Soft protectionism—in the form of local content provisions and financial mercantilism—is on the rise. Commodity prices have crashed. Unemployment is climbing, as is social unrest, and governments have started to topple.
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