This editorial follows-more than two decades later-two shorter ones written by two of the three co-editors for two of the first volumes of MEL see Thanopoulou and Kavussanos (2000). The idea of this present special issue was initiated at the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) 2019 conference, organised by the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) in Athens, Greece and kindly agreed to be hosted by MEL.The two early editorials were written at the time when the old century was drawing to a close with the general anticipation for the 21st being a mixture of hyped-up fears about IT disruption from the 'millennium bug' and of heightened hopes for unhindered growth; neither was to materialise. Instead, the first twenty years of the new century were marked by a multitude of events which were not necessarily positive. Such events included the best freight markets ever, coupled with substantially higher volatility in freight rates and ship prices-in a superlative of a shipping cycle ending abruptly after the Lehman Brothers collapse in late 2008-and the worst markets ever that followed. That negative record during the early 2016 trough was less than eight years from the cyclical peak that had preceded it and well forecasted some time earlier (Haralambides and Thanopoulou 2014). Despite abysmal market performances at various other times along the lean post-Lehman Brothers period-and the absence until late 2020 of a firmer durable recovery-yearly records in terms of world trade and world tonnage were also being continuously broken all along. Volatility seemed for years almost irrelevant: long-term investor decisions, such as vessel ordering, and traditional solutions (see Kavussanos 2002) which had been followed by owners during recessions, such as scrapping and lay-up, seemed to be all but disappearing, despite dramatic conditions prevailing often in most markets, albeit not necessarily concurrently across them.
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