‘Nonsense Rate’: Iran War Exposes Turmoil Behind Key Tanker Benchmark

By Jack Farchy and Alex Longley (Bloomberg) — In March this year, inside a 282-year-old institution responsible for one of the most important prices in global oil markets, one man staged a quiet protest.

“Nonsense rate,” Christopher Loveday wrote on March 23 in an internal document at the Baltic Exchange, where he was responsible for helping produce the world’s benchmark rate for shipping oil. “Still a nonsense,” he wrote two days later. On March 31, as he filled in his section of the spreadsheet that sets the price of a benchmark underpinning billions of dollars in freight derivatives trading, he wrote: