Brexit is strengthening the forces that already haunt global economy

Sometimes, something bad happens, and it creates huge financial market swings and long-lasting economic ripples. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an example, as was the 2011 Japanese nuclear disaster.

But the so-called different.

The immediate financial downturn after Britain voted Thursday to leave the European Union resembles the fallout from those disasters. But the other events were largely disconnected from the broader economic currents of their time. They were one-offevents, at least in terms of their economic ramifications.

What makes Brexit so concerning is that it accentuates and deepens global forces that have been building for years. So far, governments have been unable to limit any of it. And those forces have self-reinforcing, vicious-cycle dimensions that make it a particularly perilous time for the global economy, even though the type of full-scale panic that followed the collapse of Lehman Bros. in 2008 looks unlikely.

Britain accounts for less than 4 percent of world GDP. Most people on Earth don’t have a rooting interest in the exact details of the nation’s trade relationship with the rest of Europe. But its decision to leave the European Union is making more powerful six interrelated forces that already weigh on the global economy: Brexit is

There is a glut of global commodities, particularly oil. There is a glut of labor, with elevated unemployment in much of the world. Inflation has been persistently below the 2 percent mark that major central banks aim for, and shows little sign of rising.

And since the Brexit decision, markets are signaling that those forces have become even more energized.

The price of oil fell 7.5 percent from Thursday’s to Monday’s close, despite little reason to think that the British referendum will cause any major changes in, for example, the supply of oil from oil reserves the nation controls. And bond markets are priced at levels that imply the years ahead will have lower inflation that was priced in before the Brexit news. While high inflation is often viewed as the greater threat, in the last few years economists have viewed too-low inflation — which can discourage spending and investment and make debts more onerous — as the more pressing concern.