Government spending, particularly on the military, also rose, while economic weakness around the globe caused foreign countries to trim their purchases of American goods.
In John Christopher's "The Death of Grass," from 1956, a new virus infects grasses across the globe, causing mass famine.
The collapse of the US bank Lehman Brothers has sent shockwaves around the globe, causing stock markets to plummet and throwing the financial world into turmoil.
Chikungunya originated in Africa and has since spread across the entire globe causing large numbers of epidemics that have infected millions of people in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Europe, the Americas, and Pacific Islands.
The hidden toll and extraordinary neglect of a disease that affects an estimated 176 million women around the globe, causing many to suffer a life of pain and debilitation and sometimes infertility, is revealed by the Guardian.
What's more, these exotic investments have been exported all over the globe, causing losses in places as distant from Wall Street as a small Norwegian town north of the Arctic Circle.
When it filed for bankruptcy protection early on the following Monday morning, its $600 billion balance sheet, interlinked as it was with financial institutions and hedge funds across the globe, caused mayhem.
The previous year, Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted, producing an ash cloud so vast and thick that it blocked out sunlight across the globe, causing temperatures to plummet and crops to fail.
The northernmost latitudes are warming twice as fast as other parts of the globe, causing the thawing of polar ice, which leads to shifts in the jet stream, which leads to glaciers and sea ice melting at record speeds.
Measles continues to survive around the globe, causing 145,700 deaths in 2013, the World Health Organization says.
