Lloyd’s Ship Finance Conference Wrap-Up

So what have we learned?” asked a somewhat exhausted Chairman Morten Arntzen of Chase Manhattan Bank after last month’s latest 48-hour Lloyd’s Ship Finance Conference/Marathon. Curiously enough, we learned a lot. Principally, we learned from Ted Petropoulos of Petrofin Financial Services that while the total number of banks offering ship finance continues to grow with no end in sight, the number of “major” banks offering ship finance has begun to level off. While this item is not particularly newsworthy, his follow-on comments – that this overall increase will ultimately prove to be positive for the ship finance community in the long term – raised enough eyebrows for us to ask for his permission to reprint his speech which we encourage you to read.

In our view, the big winner of the Conference was none other than our home-grown Dr. Arlie Sterling of Marsoft Inc. and M.I.T. fame. It would appear after many long years that Marsoft has been able to convince an increasing number of bankers that they can, in fact, better support their credit decisions by heeding Marsoft’s advice. Arlie was proper to beam with pride when presenting slides showing the accuracy of Marsoft’s forecasts of panamax and aframax timecharter rates from October 1992 to date. We only wish that there had been a few Greek and/or Norwegian owners in attendance to challenge him.

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