Gulp

David Rothkopf highlights an economic statistic I didn’t know:

The scariest statistic to come down the economic pike in recent months? Not the ILO’s prediction of 51 million unemployed worldwide in 2009. Not China’s estimate of 20 million migrant workers in that country having lost their jobs. Not the projections of first quarter U.S. economic contraction passing the Fourth Quarter’s 3.8 percent contraction at a trot. It’s the Institute for International Finance’s estimate that net private sector capital flows into the emerging world will fall in 2009 to one fifth their 2007 levels. That’s, right, an 80 percent reduction in private sector cash into a group of fragile countries for whom such cash is the peace-keeper, the hope-giver.