Proving Out the Super Cycle

“It’s a super-cycle,” said an unshaven shipowner behind dark sunglasses at La Goulue on Madison Avenue last spring – whispering the words as though they referred to contraband.

“A what?” I asked innocently, looking up only briefly from steak frittes and pretending not to know the phenomena to which he was referring.

It wasn’t the sort of scene you might imagine when meeting with a Greek shipowner in a New York restaurant. We were sitting on sunlit Madison Avenue in late spring, eating lunch before 4 p.m., watching the people walk by, and no one was either smoking or drinking. The shipowner had, in fact, just come from pilates class. Things have changed.

“You know, a super-cycle,” he said ominously. “All of the data you see from the shipping brokerage houses goes back only as far as the 1980s. And what that data tells you has become the conventional wisdom; that buying and holding ships over time is not a good use of capital over a sustained period of time.”

This is only an excerpt of Proving Out the Super Cycle

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