Liner shipping is traditionally a cyclical business, subject to dramatic peaks and troughs and sudden changes in fortune in individual trade lanes. Today's ebullience among all sectors of container shipping, including its various intermediaries, compares starkly with the situation in the latter part of 2001, when the market had hit a low point and the prophets of doom were out in force. Yet, only a year before that, market analysts had been talking of inexorable growth in seaborne containerized transport. Right now, the industry exudes confidence that the bull market for deepsea carriers will continue through 2004, after what proved generally to be a boom time for the liner shipping world last year, on the back of a rebounding world economy.