Baltic Dry Index Update

About a week ago I featured a chart of the Baltic Dry Index which track the worldwide price of dry shipping cargo. The Index can be quite volatile, but the trend of the index is telling.

The BDI tells us what demand is for the shipping dry goods (meaning it excludes Oil, Natural Gas, etc) across the world. When prices are low, there is plenty of capacity and it tells us that worldwide economic activity is slowing, demand for imported goods is slowing, exports are slowing, when prices are high it tells us the economy is running at a healthy clip as demand for everything from textiles to I-phones is strong.

The last BDI update skipped the volatility and an underlying downtrend was clear.

Here's today's update (note the BDI is updated every day).

Here's the recent Trend...

And on a 3 year chart, the BDI just hit 1014, levels not seen since 1/27/2009.

Obviously this is macro data and you probably could have guessed it wouldn't be good, but at the levels of early 2009 is quite dramatic, especially when one considers where the stock market is now compared to early 2009.