Global Trade Meets Ugly Reality…”Years of painfully slow growth slashed in one fell swoop!”
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
July 22, 2016
Something funny happened when I didn’t look: the global trade numbers were adjusted down. By a lot. The post-Financial Crisis recovery in trade is suddenly a heck of a lot less vibrant than it looked. And it has completely stalled out over the past two years.
The CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a division of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, just released its Merchandise World Trade Monitor for May. It was, in its own right, not very uplifting.
World trade volume shrank 0.4% in May, after shrinking 0.3% in April. The index fell to 133.0, the lowest level since May 2015. It’s back where it had first been in September 2014.
But wait…. Last time we wrote about the World Trade Monitor (WTM) was July a year ago. We’ve kept our eyes on it because it is a valuable and unique tool in trying to gauge global trade. So this time, something jarred us, and we went back to look at the data from a year ago: the entire data series going back to Adam and Eve has been adjusted downward, with the most significant adjustments kicking in after the Financial Crisis.
Turns out, the recovery of global trade was a lot weaker than the original data had indicated. Today’s WTM level of 133 is where it had first been under the old data in October 2013! Two-and-a-half years of painfully slow growth wiped out in one fell swoop!
So we did something vile. We overlaid the old data and the adjusted data, for all to see. This chart includes the old data released as of July 2015 (blue line) and the new adjusted data released today (red line):
The Rest…HERE
