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The Baltic Dry Index measuring rates for coal, iron ore, and grains, and other dry goods plummeted below 1000 yesterday, down 92pc since peaking in June.

The daily rental rates for Capesize big ships have dropped $234,000 to $7,340 in weeks, leaving operators stuck with heavy losses on long leases. Empty ships are now crowding Singapore and other global ports.

“It is extremely serious, ” said Jeremy Penn, president of the Baltic Exchange. “Freight rates have never fallen this steeply before. It is telling us that world trade in raw materials has slowed dramatically. Shippers are having genuine difficulty obtaining letters of credit from banks,” he said.

The shipping crisis is another blow to the City of London, which earned £1.3bn in foreign receipts from the industry last year. Maritime services employs 14,500 staff in the UK.

It is also beginning to cause strains in Greece, where the yield spread between Greek 10-year bonds and German Bunds rocketed to a post-EMU record of 123 basis points yesterday.

The upheavals on the bond markets came as Iceland was forced to raise interest rates 6 percentage points to 18pc by the IMF as a condition for its $2bn (£1.3bn) rescue package.

The draconian terms raise fears that the IMF will apply the same medicine to Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, as well as Pakistan and a long list of other countries that may soon need a bail-out. Critics says the Fund risks repeating errors it made in Asia’s 1998 crisis when it imposed a one-size-fits-all contraction policy on the region, causing bitter anti-Western feelings and arguably making matters worse.

A deflationary strategy of this kind could prove counterproductive –or worse – if applied in enough countries simultaneously. It would defeat a key purpose of the rescues, which is to stabilise the global financial system.

The Icelandic krona traded for the first time in a week, but dealers said it was changing hands at roughly 240 to the euro compared with the rate of 152 to the euro fixed by the central bank.

Ominously for Greece, this is the first time its debt has broken its tight linkage with Italian bonds – which traded at spreads of 100 yesterday. The markets are now clearly singling out the country as the most vulnerable of the EMU members.

“This shipping slowdown is a worry for Greece, ” said Chris Pryce, a director of Fitch Ratings, which downgraded the country’s credit outlook last week. Fitch warned that Greece has a public debt of 92pc of GDP, leaving it no safe margin for fiscal stimulus in a downturn.

“Shipping has overtaken tourism to become the country’s biggest industry. They get their finance from other countries, so I think there are going to be a lot of worried bankers in London,” he said.