Is history repeated? Cycles and recessions in shipping markets, 1929 and 2008
by Alexander M. Goulielmos
International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics (IJSTL), Vol. 1, No. 4, 2009

Abstract: The idea of the paper created by the 1990 monograph of M. Hampton, who argued that history of shipping is repeated in the short run cycles (three to four years), the long cycles (16-24 years) and the long Kondratieff waves of 56 years. Thus, we argue in this paper that the 2008-2012 Second Great Depression has started now. A short-run shipping cycle of three to four years duration detected in this paper for 1998-2008 weekly freight market BP index, using the non-parametric rescaled range analysis and V-statistic. These were invented by Hurst (1951) and brought to prominence and to finance by Mandelbrot. This cycle started on August 1, 2005 and ended on October 13, 2008 (166 weeks out of 208 for a four-year theoretical duration of the cycle). So, we had to forecast further 42 future weeks that were missing (208 minus 166). The system, however, found to be non-linear and chaotic with long-term memory and thus, we had to apply a methodology suggested by Siriopoulos and Leontitsis (2000) and to forecast six weeks only as this is allowed by system's Lyapunov's coefficient.

Online publication date: Fri, 07-Aug-2009

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