This is Why World Trade is the Weakest Since 2009

Jon Blogosphere, Economy, Market Commentary

Despite what you may think, it’s not due to protectionism.
World Trade has been on our worry-list for a while, most recently in December [World Trade Falls to 2014 Level, just in Time for a ‘Trade War’]. Why has world trade refused to boom recently? And it wasn’t just last year. But last year was particularly crummy. Lackluster global demand gets blamed. But that’s using a broad brush to sketch a troublesome development.
Now the alarmed World Bank, in its report, Trade Developments in 2016 (PDF), barely blames the usual suspects for this lackluster global demand, but identifies a new and dominant one: ‘policy uncertainty.’
It points out that 2016 was the fifth year in a row of ‘sluggish trade growth.’ 2015 had already been the weakest year since 2009, when global trade collapsed as a result of the Financial Crisis. But 2016 was even worse than 2015.
World trade is devilishly hard to quantify, and so the estimates for 2016 vary:

This post was published at Wolf Street by Wolf Richter ‘ Feb 21, 2017.