SOMEWHERE out there is a small army of researchers who apparently spend their days asking anonymous industry leaders what is keeping them awake at night.

Once the medical conditions are eliminated, the responses tend to converge around the big scary topics of the day and offer us a global outlook that is increasingly fractured across geopolitical, environmental, societal, economic and technological domains.

The latest of these global risk surveys, this time from the pessimistic prognosticators at Aon, tell us that we have entered a new era of converging risks and accelerating disruption.

Geopolitical volatility has surged nearly 30 places in the risk-list ranking since 2019, to enter the top 10 for the first time.

The fact that geopolitical instability affects supply chains, influences the regulatory landscape and has an impact on balance sheets, should perhaps not be new news to people identifying themselves as industry leaders. Nor should it be a revelation that these top risks are systemic and interconnected.

But when you survey shipping leaders, who well understand the inter-connectedness of global trade, you get much the same result.

And that’s because almost all the decisions that a shipping business leader is taking today has nothing to do with shipping and everything to do with the big geopolitical risk factors they can’t control.

Everything from trade lanes to engine specs are informed by a bet on which way the political wind is going to be blowing.

This is an industry that is mulling a bet on a generational investment cycle in fuels that don’t exist by second guessing how the power balance of a new geopolitical world order is going to shake out in voting numbers at the IMO.

Even the short-term decisions are nothing to do with shipping.

No sane chief executive should be ordering new containerships right now without a solid long-term charter, at least not based on a traditional economic rationale. But if you factor in the political questions then anything is possible.

Perhaps it does make sense for Cosco to start building 100 vessels if Xi Jinping really does want a higher percentage of Chinese goods on Chinese ships.

When we read the results of these doom-laden surveys that are keeping chief executives awake at night, perhaps we have mistaken their nightmares for dreams.

Richard Meade,
Editor-in-chief, Lloyd’s List

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