From Zero Hedge:

The Daily Mail recently made waves with a photo exposing what it called the "ghost fleet of the recession" where hundreds of ships were shown on anchor off the straits of Singapore, doing nothing except rusting: a tribute to the unprecedented collapse in world trade, the bulk of which is seaborne, and the huge amount of excess slack in shipping.

Zero Hedge decided to probe this idea further, and for that we took advantage of the very useful real time ship tracker functionality provided by vesseltracker.com (any reader who has Google Earth can easily replicate these results using the following data file).

The bottom line: world trade has collapsed, shipping lines, once flourishing, have become graveyard archipelagos populated by rusting ship skeletons. Yet all of this is beyond the land, and thus far from sight.

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