The breakdown of international trade is key threat to the global economy in 2009, says Chris Mayer. Several countries have already taken action to protect domestic industries, including the US with its auto bailout. If this trend continues, Chris says the global downturn could become even deeper than imagined.This from The Daily Reckoning:

Where trade flourishes, business is good. But trade does not always flourish. The linked forces of globalization move in fits and starts.

The authors of Power and Plenty, a new book on trade over the last thousand years, tell us as much. “If anything,” they write, “history suggests that globalization is a fragile and easily reversible process.”

One of the looming threats in 2009 is the reversal in trade flows and increasing barriers to trade.

For the first time since 1982, The World Bank predicts global trade volumes will shrink in 2009. Undoubtedly, global trade

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Nouriel Roubini, professor at Stern School of Business at New York University and chairman of RGE Monitor, is renowned for having foreseen the current economic malaise a number of years ago. He was scorned at the time by mainstream economists for being a crank, but the same people are now lauding him for his foresight and paying top price for the consulting services of Roubini Global Economics.

Aline van Duyn, US Markets Editor of the Financial Times, has just conducted a three-part video interview with Roubini on topics ranging from the likely duration of the recession to regulation, the demise of more hedge funds and the outlook for stocks, commodities, currencies and bonds.

In Part 1 of the interview, Roubini expects 2009 to be a

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By Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Russia's foreign-exchange reserves have been now been declining very rapidly since mid August, and as the money goes so does the faith that the large stock of reserves the country built up during the boom times would be sufficient to see them through any downturn in energy prices. As the money leaves, so it seems does the decade of economic growth and stability which they symbolised. Indeed so rapid has been the decline that Russia's international reserves, which are the third-biggest after those of China and Japan, have now fallen $161 billion, or 27% percent, since 8 August last, and decreased by $17.9 billion to $437 billion in the week to 5 December. Investors have now pulled $211 billion out of the country since August, according to estimates by BNP Paribas.br /br /br /pa href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SUbQptNe4tI/AAAAAAAALyE/K0xlBOy3AlA/s1600-h/russia+GDP.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5280137028067844818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /blockquoteIn view of Greece's EMU membership, the availability of external financing is not a concern, but the correction of cumulating indebtedness could weigh appreciably on growth going forward. While the risk of transmitting vulnerabilities to the euro area is very small reflecting Greece’s small relative size, large persistent current account deficits would increase the vulnerabilities to a reversal in market sentiment, leading to a corrective retrenchment of private sector balance-sheets in the face of rising indebtedness, and a possible appreciable rise in the cost of funding over time. These developments would have significant negative implications for growth.br /a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=21937.0"Greece: 2007 Article IV Consultation/a - IMF Staff Report/blockquotepbr /br //ppa href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SUEsR712NQI/AAAAAAAALuU/VGFiqyCyzBw/s1600-h/bond+spreads+2.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278548924887872770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; HEIGHT: 170px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SUEsR712NQI/AAAAAAAALuU/VGFiqyCyzBw/s320/bond+spreads+2.png" border="0" //abr /The above quited paragraph from the IMF is a very good example of what used to be ...

Controversy surrounding the Romanian economy is nothing new, nor, as a href="http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2008/11/romania-votes-under-new-electoral.html"Manuel points out in his post on the recent election/a, are Romanian politics strangers to tumult. Nonetheless the intensity of controversy has grown considerably of late, with a wide variety of assessments being offered concerning the likely impact of the intensifying international credit crisis on the short to medium term outlook for the Romanian economy. National Bank of Romania (NBR) governor, Mugur Isarescu, has been consistently arguing that the country should be able to avoid an excessively "hard landing"as the bank attempts to cool its evidently overheated economy and engages of fire-extinguising activities in the banking sector trying to control the impact of set of adverse external circumstances that are largely beyond its control. But most of these comments (or at least the more convincing ones) preceded the meltdown in the international financial markets which followed the Lehman Brothers ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Controversy surrounding the Romanian economy is nothing new, nor, as a href="http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2008/11/romania-votes-under-new-electoral.html"Manuel points out in his post on the recent election/a, are Romanian politics strangers to tumult. Nonetheless the intensity of controversy has grown considerably of late, with a wide variety of assessments being offered concerning the likely impact of the intensifying international credit crisis on the short to medium term outlook for the Romanian economy.National Bank of Romania (NBR) governor, Mugur Isarescu, has been consistently arguing that the country should be able to avoid an excessively "hard landing"as the bank attempts to cool its evidently overheated economy and engages of fire-extinguising activities in the banking sector trying to control the impact of set of adverse external circumstances that are largely beyond its control. But most of these comments (or at least the more convincing ones) preceded the meltdown in the international financial markets which ...

by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera, Puerto Ricobr /br /Voters in Romania went to the polls on Sunday to choose members of both houses of the South-eastern European nation's bicameral Parliament, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. However, voters cast ballots for candidates in single-member constituencies - 137 in the Senate and 315 in the Chamber of Deputies - under a new electoral system introduced earlier this year, which replaced the party-list proportional representation system in place since 1990, following the downfall of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu the preceding year.br /br /Romanian expatriates also took part in the election, with six constituencies (two in the Senate, four in the Chamber) set aside for them.br /br /Romania's Central Electoral Bureau's A HREF="http://www.becparlamentare2008.ro/"2008 parliamentary elections/A website has partial results in Romanian only.br /br /Although the election took place in single-member constituencies, it should be noted that the new system - introduced to make Romanian ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /blockquote“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”br /Tolstoy/blockquotebr /Well this strongis/strong an interesting little fable of modern family life, even if all the families involved may not be ones which many of my readers would normally wish to belong to.br /br /As is now reasonably well know Russian private oil company Lukoil is currently making a bid for the shares in Spanish energy company Repsol which are owned by the deeply indebted Spanish property company Sacyr Vallhermosa.br /br /Shares in what is Spain's fifth biggest builder, and which currently occupies the somewhat ignominious position of being Spain's worst-performing stock this year, jumped the most in two years last Thursday (20 November) on reports they were about to sell their 20 percent stake in Repsol YPF to the Russian oil company OAO Lukoil. Sacyr, which said last week it ...

by Edward Hugh: BarcelonaItaly, which is still the eurozone's third biggest economy, slipped into a recession in the third quarter. The Italian economy fell into what is now its fourth recession in less than a decade as gross domestic product shrank 0.5 percent from its level in the second quarter, when it contracted a revised 0.4 percent, the national statistics office said today. This is already Italy's worst recession since 1992, and there is evidently more and worse to come.Italy effectively followed Germany, Europe's largest economy, in posting two consecutive quarters of contraction -- the technical definition of a recession. Spain contracted on the quarter, while France narrowly avoided recession by posting a slender 0.1% expansion after contracting in the second quarter.From the third quarter of 2007 the economy contracted 0.9 percent, and this was the sharpest ...

Fitch Ratings downgraded the sovereign ratings of Hungary (to BBB from BBB-plus), Bulgaria, Kazakhstan (by one notch to BBB-, the lowest investment-grade level) and Romania (by two notches to BB-plus from BBB) on Monday while warning that the ratings of South Korea, South Africa, Russia and Mexico are also in jeopardy.  European Union members Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic states “may not be able to handle their large foreign debt burdens, which could spark financial crises,” Fitch said, adding that problems in advanced economies “triggered extreme volatility in emerging market asset prices” and prompted “liquidity strains”.

It lowered its outlook on South Korea, Mexico, Russia and South Africa to negative from stable, while that of Chile and Malaysia were cut to stable from positive.