The Shipping Man

McCleery, who works in shipping finance, wrote a novel about a New York hedge fund manager who buys a bulk carrier almost by accident and then has to learn how the industry works. The fictional frame carries a substantial amount of accurate technical content about ship finance.

The material covered includes: how vessels are bought and sold in the secondhand market and why prices move with charter rates rather than with construction cost; the difference between spot, time charter and bareboat employment and how each allocates risk; the mechanics of ship mortgages, flags of convenience, single-purpose companies and the offshore ownership structures the industry uses; how Greek and Norwegian owners have historically outperformed institutional investors through counter-cyclical timing; the shipyard order cycle and why owners order at exactly the wrong point; and the capital markets side, including shipping initial public offerings and the reasons public shipping companies destroy shareholder capital.

The underlying argument is the capital cycle applied to one industry. Freight rates rise, owners order ships, the ships arrive two years later, rates collapse, and the cycle repeats. The people who make money buy assets when nobody wants them and sell when yards are full.

As a novel it is thin and the characters are functional. Its value is as an accessible introduction to shipping economics for someone who needs to understand the industry, and it circulates for that reason rather than for its literary qualities. Readers wanting rigour should follow it with a proper text on maritime economics.