The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has announced that around $50 trillion dollars in global financial assets disappeared last year. Fifty trillion dollars -- that’s just about the gross domestic product of the entire planet for one full year.Shamim Adam of Bloomberg reports:The global economy is likely to shrink for the first time since World War II, and trade will decline by the most in 80 years, the World Bank said yesterday. Its assessment is more pessimistic than an IMF report in January predicting 0.5 percent global growth this year.Developing nations will bear the brunt of the contraction and they will face a shortfall of between $270 billion and $700 billion to pay for imports and service debts, the Washington- based World Bank said.Protectionist measures by countries to prevent a deeper fallout from the global downturn won’t work, said Claudio Loser, a former International Monetary Fund director and the author of the report that was commissioned by the...(Read Full Post)