Keep on Truckin'.(international trade)(Brief Article)

Overnight, it seems that our borderless world has become all about bottlenecks. The shock waves from New York have put international mergers on ice, rocked the travel and insurance industries and brought the U.S. operations of numerous overseas companies to a halt. Delays in transatlantic shipments have slowed business in Europe, and tighter security at borders is wreaking economic havoc in American towns that depend on Mexican and Canadian traffic. The free-flowing trade at the heart of the New Economy suddenly looks like a security hazard.

Can globalization recover? Yes, because the forces that fueled it have not changed. Businesses still need to grow, expand and follow their customers. And there are ways to keep the goods, money and people moving more securely. For starters, governments are doing what they can simply to keep the economy alive. Over the past two weeks, central bankers in the United States, Europe and Japan have lubricated the markets with hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of extra funds. Interest-rate cuts followed in the United States and Europe.

The crisis has prompted both businesses and governments to put aside smallish differences and work together. In the days following the blast, banks agreed not to call in loans suddenly, competitors shared office space and financial regulators allowed more time to settle trades. On a larger scale, the United States and Europe hammered out an agreement that would allow China into the WTO, shelving longstanding issues about who would get the most favorable trade terms.

In fact, the antiterrorist coalition that President George W. Bush is building may have economic implications of its own. For years European countries with secretive banking operations, particularly Switzerland, have been reluctant to open up their books to scrutiny. Last week British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown indicated that it was time for these countries to stand either with the coalition or against it. "Switzerland must take the action that's required," said Brown, "and we are determined that other countries that have traditionally valued banking secrecy must also accept that... they must have institutions that are prepared to report suspicious ...