Starvin Larry

Ran across this YouTube video about the destruction of the world’s container ship fleet. Summary: due to the drastic drop in world trade caused by the lockdowns, the world’s container ship fleets are being decommissioned and sold for scrap. The decades-long trend to larger and larger ships, which reduce the unit cost of shipping compared to smaller ships, has been dramatically reversed: the larger, more modern ships are the first to go, because, while they are more efficient when fully loaded, they are money-hemorrhaging disasters when sailed at less than capacity. Thus, ships worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, with decades of useful life left in them, are being run ashore in Bangladesh and scrapped.

(China is spending heavily on infrastructure, raising demand for scrap iron, raising the scrap value of those container ships. All this means is that the math leans even more toward ‘sell it for…