The Nature of Economic Turbulence: The Power Destructing Economies, with Application to Shipping

Abstract

Studying the history of “economic turbulence”, we ended up with the certainty that the statistical methods used so far, by economists, are unsuitable to model it. We have mainly the methods of Normal distribution and Random Walk in mind. Moreover, the picture of reality we get from time series depends on the time-frame of the data used… Different time-frame data, different reality… In addition, econometricians provided a whole family of econometric models to approach reality, starting in early 1980s, with “autoregressive models—AR” combined or not with MA (moving averages). But even its 1986 flagship, the GARCH, with its many variations, cannot cope with a number of characteristics, one of which is leptokurtosis (small alpha, higher peaks and long tails), though some argue that it can cater for outliers. Economic turbulence, low or high—despite its characterization by Science as rare—became frequent since 1987 (Black Monday)... In late 1990s e.g. the global financial system underwent 6 crises—which have been called “near turbulences”—over a number of countries, including Russia in 1998. The next turbulence will not be one generation apart—we reckon. This paper is an attempt to invite writers to write a “theory of economic turbulence”. Turbulence is a nightmare, which wakes people up suddenly, and unexpectedly, but it is something people wish to forget… till it strikes again: turbulence stroke in 1929 on (Black) Tuesday, then in 1987 on (Black) Monday and in end-2008, the Great Recession—on 29th September. In Black Monday stock markets around the world crashed losing a huge value in a matter of very short time (Hong Kong, Europe, and USA). The Dow fell ~23%. At that time OPEC collapsed in 1986 and the price of oil doubled… The dry cargo shipping sector entered a turbulent situation since 1989, which has been deteriorated since 2015 reaching finally an alpha equal to ~1.43 < 1.70 by 2035…