- The history and financial textbooks of the future are likely to include this chart above, or some variant thereof. The Baltic Dry Shipping Index is a composite index of bulk shipping rates for various types of cargo, mostly commodity-type cargo such as iron ore, crude oil and grains. It is considered a reliable leading economic indicator without speculative elements involved, since nobody books space on a large cargo ship if they don't have anything to ship.
Hence, the over 90% drop in this index means that the demand for shipping bulk cargo has fallen off the cliff. And the sudden drop in demand for shipping these raw materials like iron, copper and so on is signalling that the global economy is heading for collapse. It's a horrendous scenario depicted in this chart. You can imagine what the GDP figures for 2009 are going to look like.
[snip]