I hope that this headline, if you saw it, scared you as much as it did me. Although I have some confidence about the future of shipping, or I wouldn’t be here, my topic today is about forecasting. Forecasting, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, had a lot to do with omens. The ancient Greeks sought their guidance from the stars, which they believed help them predict the course of future events. The Romans, on the other hand, sought to predict the future in the flight of birds, the cackling of geese, and most famously in the examining of entrails of poultry and domestic animals. The experts who did this kind of thing were called augurs. Today, we rely on Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. History, however, is on the side of the ancients.