Friday, October 30th, 2026
Bill Bonner, from Ardmore, Ireland
This is a morality tale. Or a financial lesson. Or a lifestyle warning. Or just a jolly sea story. You decide.
You pay $350,000 for a cabin on a ship that is meant to travel the globe. It intends to visit 147 countries in three years, the cruise of a lifetime. You’re not just taking a holiday; you are going to make your new life on the ship.
You join the party in Vietnam. You find your cabin and prepare for much-awaited retirement bliss. The ship puts out to sea and you reach for a drink with an umbrella in it. But between sips, you notice that the ship is not making waves. It is just floating...like a piece of driftwood.
And then, a few weeks later, in Cambodia of all places, you are told to abandon ship. The operators are out of money...and you are out of luck. PEOPLE reports:
Passengers stranded by ‘never-ending’ cruise speak out after being forced to leave the ship: ‘It was a magical way to live’
On Wednesday, Oct. 28, Florida-based company Villa Vie Residency’s Odyssey cruise ship gave 200 passengers…notice that they would need to pack their things and leave the ship in the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville, The New York Times reported.
The company had taken “significant steps to reduce fuel consumption, including slowing the itinerary and spending more time in port,” Villa Vie Residency said in a statement to the BBC. However, these steps were not enough to “offset the extraordinary increase in fuel costs.”
Energy that was supposed to cost $1,800 per month per cabin was now priced at $5,000...or $8,000.
“Passing the full increase on to residents is not a realistic solution,” Villa Vie Residency told the BBC.
Huh?
What about the guy who just paid $350,000 for the cruise that never ends?
The poor man was given eight hours to pack up his stuff and go ashore or he’d be keel-hauled by the ship’s owners.
The US press is now all over the story...but with the same feeble explanation: that the price of oil is to blame. Washington Post:
A US cruise ship suspends a global voyage in Asia due to fuel costs, stranding 200 passengers
But it’s more than just a high-priced-oil story. What really happened with the Villa Vie was what happens in every manmade disaster.
First, there are surprises. The ship had mechanical problems...which took time and money to resolve. She had been ‘stretched’ in 2008, in which more than 100 feet were added to the hull. Perhaps trying to fix the ‘stretch marks,’ the departure from Belfast in 2024 was stretched from May to October. And by then some cabin buyers/renters had jumped ship. This left the operators short of cash — or so it appears — when it finally steamed out into the Irish Sea.
Once at sea, it still was not smooth sailing. The Daily Telegraph quotes a passenger:
‘It was a cascade of problems piling up on one another, from the business model to mistakes by management to the crisis in fuel cost and availability and more.’
He told The Telegraph that residents were so concerned about the crew’s salaries being paid that some sat outside the restaurant at mealtimes collecting cash for them.…initial issues included having no hot water and not being able to flush the toilets, leading one passenger to dub it “SS Clusterf---”.
This was not the ship’s ‘maiden voyage.’ It was more of a ‘matron voyage.’ The old girl had hung around the waterfront dives more than once. But the fatal trouble developed only over the last few months. One report tells us that passengers were called to an emergency on-board meeting. They were asked to help raise $1 million — immediately — so the ship could keep the lights on.
This must have sent passengers back to their rooms, where they pulled out their contracts with the ship and began to squint at the fine print. And now the company CEO says:
“I get it. I get it. I feel awful. They’re counting on me to make the decisions here and there’s nothing else I’m focused on. I’m the villain in the story, but I’m doing everything I can to support the residents on a solution forward.”
Everything he can do? The moral of the story is that if he had done what he ought to have done when he ought to have done it the ship would still be riding the waves. The company surely kept an eye on how much it cost to fill the fuel tanks...and surely one of the things the CEO should have done was to make sure they could pay it.
Readers will rush to blame him; he made a ‘mistake,’ they will say. But the ‘mistake’ explanation is too tidy. Too limited. Every mistake has a father and a mother…and a godmother….and a first cousin.
Maybe Donald Trump shouldn’t have killed all those Iranians. And maybe voters shouldn’t have re-elected him.
And G.W. Bush should never have attacked Iraq. And Obama should never have proposed his Obamacare. Trump should never have shut down the economy in the Covid hysteria. Biden should never have given out more stimmies. And between them all — Bush II to Trump II, 2000-2026 — they should never have saddled the US with $34 trillion more in debt.
Didn’t Nixon and Friedman make one of the biggest mistakes in US history, when in 1971, they introduced their new, disappearing money? And isn’t that part of the problem…that, in dollars, oil costs a lot more than it should? And fake money was so easy to get that the feds thought they could get away with anything.
By 2026, it had bought the most powerful military the world had ever seen. And didn’t it seem like a swell idea to use it…to bomb the Hell out of Iran...hoping for a quick, easy victory just before the midterm elections?
‘It was a magical way to live,’ said one of the disembarked passengers. And then, poof, the spell was broken.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Written who knows how long ago, the script will continue, regardless of who the POTUS is.
Maybe the company should have hedged the expenses which were variable over the 3yr term of the contract?