In this pivotal year of global elections where the power blocs are squaring up to each other over trade, macroeconomic circumstance has thrust shipping into the limelight. Shipping has a window of opportunity to insert itself at the heart of the big political discussions by reminding politicians of the central role that national fleets and maritime sectors play in keeping economies and trade afloat. From supply chain vulnerabilities to energy security, government and the general public at large have never been more aware of the intrinsic role that shipping plays in its daily lives. Trade is st ..read more

Shipping is getting increasingly more complex and more expensive. On balance, that could be a good thing in that it forces the hand of an industry that has been too cheap for too long and the direction of regulatory travel now at least favours the progressives over the laggards. But we don’t know the detail. We don’t know what fuel availability or costs looks like. We don’t know the detail of what market based mechanism or fuel standard will emerge – or even if it will. We don’t know when ships ordered today are realistically going to be filling their duel-fuelled tanks with which fuels at wha ..read more

LAST July Ukraine’s deep sea maritime trade dried up with the collapse of the Black Sea Initiative. Within days Ukraine put forward a proposal to the UN detailing a route that would see ships sailing through Romanian waters to reach the greater Odesa ports. In August Ukraine announced the opening of a “humanitarian” corridor, pitching the route as a way to evacuate stranded ships. The initial departures were indeed stuck ships, but in September the first vessels started to arrive from foreign markets and this so-called “new” Black Sea corridor was officially open for business. Since then over ..read more

On International Women’s Day, Stephanie Zank tells Lloyd’s List her story about being a trailblazer in the world of shipping As a girl growing up in Australian in the 1980s Stephanie Zank hated office jobs and loved taking things apart and putting them back together. When she first stepped on board a ship, she knew that this was the career she wanted. But her story isn’t one that we’re normally being told on International Women’s Day. Stephanie Zank battled prejudice and abuse from her cadetship and throughout her maritime career that ended in 2014 when she was diagnosed with muscular dystroph ..read more

TUESDAY this week marked P&I renewal day. That’s the name given to the annual hard deadline for the 90% of the world fleet by tonnage entered with International Group P&I clubs to renew their liability insurance for the following year. Historically, the date was considered the first on which Baltic ports were sufficiently ice free to be navigable. That looks rather quaint in these days of global warning. But 20 February is now hallowed by tradition, and doing things on 1 January like everybody else would just be boring. So this week, as is now tradition, we are dedicating the podcast t ..read more

THE shipping industry has a problem that it doesn’t like to talk about. A dark secret. Safety standards, by and large, have been steadily improving over recent decades. Ship casualties and incidents reached an all-time low, in spite of a global pandemic and a steady tightening of regulatory standards have raised the bar across the board. But there is a significant and growing fleet of ships to which none of this applies. An unprecedented deluge of sanctions has divided the industry between those operating within the established rules-based order of safety conventions, class, insurance and inte ..read more

Why has the marine insurance industry forgotten about Cynthia Mockett? That is the question at the heart of this week’s edition of the Lloyd’s List Podcast. The widow of a UK marine surveyor and consultant murdered in Yemen 13 years ago in one of the biggest marine insurance frauds in Lloyd’s of London history is still fighting for compensation, as well as payment for the work that led to his death. Cynthia Mockett, based in Plymouth, England, was the wife of Capt David Mockett, based in Aden, Yemen, until his death in July 2011, when a bomb placed in his car exploded. Days earlier, Capt Mocke ..read more

Between Black Sea disruption and two key canals choking under the pressure of climate and war, a triple whammy of blocked arteries threatens world trade. The impacts on the wider global economy could be profound. So what happened to all that talk of supply chain resilience? We have drafted in a couple experts this week to help me make sense of it all: Ryan Petersen, the founder and CEO of digital freight forwarder Flexport Jan Hoffmann, Chief of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Trade Facilitation Section For More information about Lloyd’s list Intelligence’s Pre ..read more

A tipping point has been reached in the Red Sea. The industry is now divided between those who have called the Middle East security risk as a mid-term diversion to be managed, and those who are prepared to run the gauntlet of near daily attacks on the basis that the Houthis will only target ships with an Israeli, US or UK nexus. While containerships have been diverting away from the Suez Canal since mid-December, tankers and bulkers finally started making the call to follow them last week as US and UK airstrikes against the Houthis failed to stem attacks and insurance rates spiked in response ..read more

It seems that 27 was the magic number in the end. That was how many attacks the Houthi’s landed on international shipping before the inevitable military response was triggered. On January 12th America and Britain responded with more than 60 sea and air attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen in an attempt to restore open passage, expanding the scope of the Middle East conflict. As we recorded this week’s extended edition of the Lloyd’s list Podcast on Friday we had to insert the significant and inevitable caveat that by the time you listen to this one the details will have changed – the risk assess ..read more