Economic Cycles in Maritime Shipping and Ports: The Path to the Crisis of 2008 Gustaaf De Monie Senior Director, Policy Research Corporation Jan Moorkensstraat 68, B-2600 Antwerp, Belgium. E-mail: Gustaaf.DeMonie@policyresearch.be Jean-Paul Rodrigue Department of Global Studies & Geography, Hofstra University Hempstead, New York 11549, USA. E-mail: Jean-paul.Rodrigue@Hofstra.edu Theo Notteboom Institute of Transport and Maritime Management Antwerp (ITMMA), University of Antwerp Keizerstraat 64, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium. E-mail: theo.notteboom@.ua.ac.be For: P.V. Hall, B. McCalla, C. Comtois and B. Slack (eds) Integrating Seaports and Trade Corridors. Surrey: Ashgate. 1. Introduction The underlying fundamentals that have propelled the growth of global trade over the last decades beg to question their rationale and sustainability. The end of asset inflation, the decline in debt based consumption, the overreliance on export oriented strategies and the associated trade imbalances are imposing stringent readjustments on freight distribution systems and the global value chains they support. Yet, from a business cycle perspective periods of growth are commonly followed by adjustment phases where misallocations are corrected, particularly if based on credit. Thus, the wave that has led to impressive growth figures in transport demand may shift towards a new paradigm that could have substantial consequences on the operating conditions of maritime shipping companies and transport terminals. This phase of readjustment is even more exacerbated by the extended role that finance has taken in maritime shipping, trade and transport terminals in recent years. The global economic crisis, which has been triggered in late 2008 by an unprecedented financial crisis, has soon taken on vast proportions. The crisis resulted in a generalized recession in all OECD countries and in most emerging economies, which is fundamentally challenging the direction of future trade flows and the sense of present trade organizational arrangements. Dependable factors (the stability of the world’s financial institutions, continuous and sustainable GDP growth, the reliance on the backbone economies of the OECD) and unfailing certainties (government intervention on the economy, the superiority of widely applied logistics concepts) are put in question and contested if not opposed. Since the financial industry has taken such an active role in global economic affairs, understanding global trade and transportation requires more than ever an insight into financial