I could have called thisThe Emperor’s Got No Clothes, but I will go with Charlton Heston’s line from the 1968 film, Planet of the Apes, “You maniacs! You blew it up!” Only the bosses of the great liner shipping companies of today could have been stupid enough to respond to falling freight rates by building strings of much bigger ships.
Yes, we know that the cost per slot is less on a bigger ship. We also know that responding to an excess of something – in this case slot capacity on the major trades – by making a lot more of it is not a way to get the price back up.
So why are the grown men in charge of liner shipping – men entrusted with billions of dollars’ worth of investments and on whom thousands depend for their livelihoods – so terminally stupid?
