'It’s like deja vu all over again," as the language-mangling baseball great Yogi Berra supposedly said. It certainly is in shipping markets right now, with weak markets unexpectedly slumping, in an alarming echo of some of the darkest times of recent years.

As the benchmark Baltic Dry Index crashed below 600 points at the start of this week, the crude tanker freight market also hit rock bottom, product tanker rates crumbled, and even the booming LNG market took a hit.