At the height of the crisis, between the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, those flows collapsed by 90 percent to less than 3 percent of global GDP.77 In the second half of 2008 capital flows between rich countries plunged from $17 trillion to barely more than $1.5 trillion. No other aggregate in the global economy was affected on anything like this scale or with this suddenness.
