Incredulous.

That’s probably the best way to describe the mood among analysts, economists, market participants and officials across the globe, as the U.S. attempts to turn the clock back on globalization and multilateralism.

Every week there’s a new escalation. Each day there’s another contentious soundbite. It’s always something and there’s seemingly no end in sight.

Complicating matters immeasurably is the fact that it’s no longer clear whether Donald Trump actually has a set of goals in mind, political or otherwise. He’s seemingly caught in his own reality distortion loop where “proving” he’s serious is the only guiding principle.

It’s a kind of pernicious dynamic where he seems to interpret benign assessments of his bombast as a challenge – a test of his populist mettle, if you will. He then sets about doubling and tripling down until he elicits criticism, which only serves to exacerbate the situation to the extent he interprets that criticism as yet another test of his will.

Put simply: it’s increasingly clear that he is not, in fact, a rational actor. You can’t explain his bombast by claiming it’s a “means to an end” because there is no “end”, unless you count his never-ending quest to shore up his ego.

Slowly but surely, analysts are throwing in the towel. “This strategist had held out hope until the end,” a dejected David Woo (from BofAML) wrote last month, in the context of the NATO negotiations. “We had assumed that pragmatism would prevail [but] we were wrong about the outcome and it is even possible that we were wrong about all our assumptions”, he added.

The dejection inherent in Woo’s assessment is becoming pervasive and it was on display Saturday at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, where German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said simply, “I don’t expect tangible progress to be made at this meeting.”

With no light visible at the end of the tunnel, analysts have now moved to consider what would happen in the worst case scenario and invariably, this discussion dead ends with Great Depression comparisons.

Justified or not, BNP took some time to discuss the current situation in that context in a note out late this week. You’re reminded that they now view a global recession catalyzed by an all-out trade war as a 20% probability.

And while a global recession is something different than an outright depression, nothing seems to be completely off the table given the unpredictability inherent in the Trump administration’s policies.

“Any fears of a spiral of economic contraction probably arise from analogies between the current situation and the 1930s”, BNP writes, in a note dated Friday, before reminding you that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act adopted in 1930 by the US government “prompted other nations to impose retaliatory tariffs, which made exporting difficult, resulting in the suppression of aggregate demand and the deterioration of income.”

The bank notes that “ongoing trade tensions are unlikely to lead to a scenario like the Great Depression [because that episode] was mainly caused by a banking crisis that led to liquidity drain.”

That said, BNP cautions that central banks are staring down the current trade friction with little in the way of ammunition after nearly a decade of ZIRP and NIRP and with balance sheets still bloated (and in some cases, still growing).

Additionally (and this is one thing among many that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to fully grasp), the interconnectedness of global supply chains means that “trade protectionism now comes at a clearly higher cost than before.”

BNP also posits that one reason markets have remained some semblance of resilience is that it’s impossible to hedge or otherwise price in a global depression. Or, put differently, the uncertainty is so great around trade at the current juncture that it’s leading to paralysis, with investors in the U.S. perhaps latching onto things that are knowable, like buybacks. Here’s BNP:

The intensifying trade war has so far not seen a bear market. If this indicates the markets are correctly pricing in a Great Depression-like crisis not occurring, we would agree that there is little likelihood of a repeat of the Great Depression. However, the possibility of the trade war leading to a global recession is not so small. Perhaps share prices are firm because the uncertainties are too great for risks to be priced in appropriately.

Finally, the bank warns that while central banks would undoubtedly do their best to rescue the world from a depression (“ammo” concerns notwithstanding), the very act of doing so could exacerbate tensions given the fact that a trade-related synchronized downturn would already have the trappings of a currency war:

One cause for concern is that renewed monetary easing by the world’s central banks might rekindle a fear of competitive currency devaluations. Globally, this might be a zero-sum game. For this reason, monetary easing itself poses a risk of destabilising the global financial markets by rekindling memories of currency wars.

The bank’s conclusion:

All things considered, we do not think the outlook is very bright.

We don’t either.