Diana Shipping's President: Why We Win

TheStreet.com recently sat down with Anastassis "Stacey" Margaronis, president of Diana Shipping, the dry bulk carrier based in Athens.

Margaronis has worked for Diana nearly his entire career, joining the company in 1980, well before it went public. Like his boss, Diana CEO Simeon Palios, and like executives across the Greek dry-bulk trade, Margaronis comes from a long line of shipping pros whose histories interconnect in a complex network of familial and business relationships across the centuries. Margaronis's father was a shipping lawyer, and his uncle a ship owner. And in the early part of the twentieth century, his grandfather worked as a captain on a ship owned by the grandfather of Simeon Palios.

TheStreet.com: How is Diana preparing for an eventual rebound in the economy, after such a severe collapse?

Anastassis "Stacey" Margaronis: I'll give you the answer I gave to many of the people with whom I've met over the last few days, who asked more or less the exact same question.

The collapse in rates that we witnessed last year -- and I doubt anybody would disagree with us on this -- was probably caused by problems in the credit markets. This affected shipping in two main ways. Firstly, they effectively denied ship owners of credit, when they needed it in order to go ahead with the purchasing of newbuilding ships, if they had not arranged that credit in advance. And even some, apparently, who had commitment letters signed by banks, had those commitments reneged. There's very little, unfortunately, that an owner can do when a bank suddenly decides not to go ahead.