US cruise ship docks in Cambodia, liquidates residents' homes
A US cruise ship has stopped in Cambodia over fuel costs, and residents are losing the cabins they lived in.
"—and then the cabin is just a residual, the scrap after a closed trade," said Lila Voss, who kept a spice jar in cabin 9. She still called the ship home, and she was packing when the voyage was called off.
Fuel costs have suspended a U.S. cruise ship's residential world voyage in Cambodia. ABC News, the BBC and NPR reported the halt. The ship has told hundreds of passengers who lived aboard that those cabins are no longer theirs.
The ship will not book them hotels. On Friday it will let former residents unwind their berths, meaning close the position, in lots of nine gallons of marine fuel. A pump on the pier is meant to print a cabin deed once it has swallowed the gallons.
Spokesman Calder Drummond said the ship had not failed its people. It had repriced shelter. A short (a bet that the price falls) sat in his note, and he spoke as if every bunk were already one.
Shelter you can keep only by posting fuel is not shelter. It is margin, and margin gets called.
He dropped that line on the pier and walked off. Margin is the cash a trader must put up so a sour bet may continue. The spice jar in Voss's hand was not accepted as the required cash.
Nia Pell, who writes a market letter called The Empty Bunker, named the halt the cleanest warning since the oil embargo years. That kind of warning is a leading indicator, a print that turns before the wider wreck. She has already picked the wreck.
A float is not a bottom
Nine gallons, in Pell's note, was a lot size (the smallest piece a desk will trade), not an act of care. Once a bed has a lot size, the next fear is contagion, one failure leaping to the next port. She set the gangway beside a teller window in the autumn of 2008, only with more salt on the glass.
On the pier, crew hauled a fuel hose while residents rolled bags toward a bus. Nobody said eviction. Drummond's note called the exit an orderly unwind, the phrase a desk uses when it shuts a bad trade before the trade shuts the desk.
A passenger who gave only the name Omar had packed for a port call. He got a margin call instead, the demand for fresh cash on a sour bet. He set a small chessboard on his suitcase and waited for Friday.
Floating, her night note said, is merely the lack of a printed low. The supposed win is that the hull has not yet touched the chart. She named no trade to place, and she still managed to ruin the hour.
