Most HN partipants rely on brick and mortar businesses, directly or indirectly, as first or second order revenue sources. The Baltic Dry Index is telling us that an unprecedented slowdown in global trade is occuring, the impact of which will be felt by tech firms building and selling logistics solutions, payment platforms, inventory systems, accounting applications, financial modeling software and so much more. The VC community is paying close attention to the global economy, which will impact their willingness to invest. I enjoy reading about undocumented Python regular expression libraries as much as the next guy, but a deflationary spiral spinning unabated is going to impact all our lives far more and very soon.
It's not unprecedented, the previous time this happened a global crisis was about to get underway. This is what makes (or rather, maybe made) this particular index so interesting, the fact that it doesn't lag but gave a warning ahead of time. Of course once that happens everybody will adjust their models so this won't repeat. But the previous recorded drop in this particular shipping index was a harbinger of some pretty bad news.
The duration of this decline is unprecedented. In 2008 indicators bounced back in months. This decline started in late 2013 early 2014 and appears to be increasing in intensity.
