Shipping Loan Issuance Hits $94 billion in 2007

The numbers are in. Credit problems aside, syndicated shipping loan issuance in 2007 topped out at $93.9 billion, beating the previous year’s record $76.4 billion. While we did see a fall-off in volume of 17% in the third quarter, 4Q07 and 2H07 issuance were both up, by 23% and 10% respectively. This compares reasonably to global leveraged loan volume, which was up 38% in 2007 to $1.77 trillion. However that rise was almost entirely accounted for by the first half of the year, with global 2H07 issuance down by 38% over 2006.

So shipping, it would appear, has thus far been weathering tight credit markets better than the economy at large. No doubt it is helped out by the fact that the shipping markets themselves have by and large remained at healthy, profitable levels even after coming off the dry bulk boom in the autumn. If you said five years ago that investments were safer in a foreign ship than in a major international bank, people would likely have questioned your sanity. But it couldn’t have turned out to be more true.