Maritime Economics

Elias Karakitsos is Chairman of Global Economic Research (LLC), Director and Partner of Twintop Consultants (trading FFAs in the shipping market); and an Associate Member of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, University of Cambridge, UK. He was at Imperial College, UK, for nearly 25-years, where he held the chair of economics and was Head of Economics for ten-years. He has acted as an advisor to the UK, US and EU governments, and as an investment advisor to many financial institutions, including Citigroup, Oppenheimer, Allianz, Credit Agricole and Standard Chartered. Lambros Varnavides studied economics at University College London, UK, and the London School of Economics, UK. He joined the Royal Bank of Scotland as a Shipping Analyst in 1974 and from 1998 to 2014 was the Managing Director and Global Head of Shipping at RBS. He has lectured in MIT and the Cass Business School on shipping finance and is also a Trustee Director of the Lloyds Register Foundation and a non-executive Director of the Baltic Exchange.

1. Introduction 2. The Theoretical Foundations of the Freight Market 3. The Shipyard, Scrap and Secondhand Markets 4. The Efficiency of Shipping Markets 5. Business Cycles 6. The Theory of Shipping Cycles 7. The Market Structure of Shipping and Ship Finance 8. The Financialisation of Shipping Markets 9. The Interaction of Business and Shipping Cycles in Practice 10. Investment Strategy Bibliography