SHOULD any well meaning psychologist be fortunate enough to happen upon the shipping industry, he would find a rich seam of maladjusted neurotics sufficient to keep him in research projects for many years to come.
He wouldn’t even need to look as far as the “high risk” contingent of seafarers being probed on behalf of the German insurance industry, or the pathologically valiant adrenaline junkies of the salvage industry.
No, your common-or-garden shipowner will provide any strong-willed shrink with more than enough disorders to keep his couch warm well into the next tax year.
When one recent industry gathering decided to call a straw poll of delegates to gauge who had been convinced by an obstinately bullish assessment of where the markets were headed, the audience was inevitably split down the middle.
Interestingly, the division was not by sector, but by age. Was it wisdom or was it simply the psychological scarring won through witnessing one too many downturns?
Faced with the looming promise of overcapacity, a crippling dearth of qualified crew, global economic meltdown and the continued certainty of “known unknowns” that could scupper the most conservative of game plans, shipowners are grinning through the anxiety and assuring us and each other that it will all be OK. Is this the behaviour of a rational industry?
Possibly not, but as Aristotle once noted, presumably after his historically undocumented foray into the dry bulk sector, “no great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness”.
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