TITLE:
An Anatomy of Cycles in Shipping Industry, 1946-2020
AUTHORS:
Alexandros M. Goulielmos
KEYWORDS:
Business and Shipping Cycles Defined, Their Duration, Historical and Mathe-matical Counting, Rescaled Range Analysis, Impossibility of Forecasting
JOURNAL NAME:
Modern Economy,
Vol.11 No.10,
October
30,
2020
ABSTRACT: The paper provided a help to shipowners—we believe—by determining the
duration of cycles, first historically, since 1741, and par excellence since
1945, to 2020, and then mathematically, using Chaos Theory. It was remarkable
to find out
that both approaches gave the same outcome: shipping cycles lasted 6 years
(rounded). We have also explored the possibility to predict a shipping cycle
with reference to previous repeated attempts to forecast freight markets, but
in this paper, we wanted to see what to suggest to shipowners, when forecasting
is impossible—as is! This is in line with most important Greek shipowners, like
Mr. G Procopiou, who suggests to ignore forecasters. The paper, however, showed
the important corollary that bad times are longer than good times, helping to avoid fatal
mistakes as those committed by Sanko shipping of Japan in 1980s. We showed also
the more important corollary for businessmen that technology brought shipping
cycles closer! We have re-introduced the concept of Joker, rejecting the theory
that shipping is a “poker game”. To predict the coming of a Joker has not been
so far achieved, though we have predicted the start of the 2008 depression
using Chaos theory… Ten at
least Jokers have appeared since 1951, including the 2019 Pandemic.