This is an interesting case for a number of reasons.One of these reasons is that the case illustrates the difficulty of analysing an economic problem by using abstract legal concepts instead of doing so directly.  This is something US courts are much better at doing than UK courts are. 

The point of contract damages is to put the innocent party in the same economic position that he would have been in had the contract been performed as intended whilst not imposing on the breaching party an obligation to pay for losses that he did not cause. In this case, the capital value of the ship was not affected by the existence of the contract or by its breach. Therefore, the capital value of the ship at any point of time is irrelevant to the outcome of the dispute.  Full stop.  

This follows from the fact that the usual way of determining the value of an income producing asset is by the income the asset will generate over its useful life, discounted to the present, with some adjustments (such as for the cost of repairs over the life of the asset).  When a contract for income from using an asset (such as a lease or a charter-party) is breached, the owner of the asset is, in most cases, put in the same position he would have been in had the contract not been breached by providing him with the same income stream the contract promised he would receive.  That replacement income may come from an action for damages for the breach, or from a new contract for income, or from some combination of the two. There is no separate claim for the loss in capital value for the asset because that value is derived from the income itself. Adding the loss of capital value to the claim for lost income would, in most cases, count the same loss twice.  Equally, if, as a result of the breach, the income from the asset will increase then there is no loss from that breach.  

There are exceptions to this, of course.  Sometimes the reduction in the capital value of an asset is greater than the lost income arising from a breach of contract because the contract provides some extra-income producing capacity that benefits the owner more than the income from the contract does.

For example, when an anchor tenant in a shopping mall terminates the lease before the end of its term and leaves the space vacant, the loss of rental income from the shopping mall may be greater than the loss of income from the lease, thereby reducing the capital value of the mall by an amount greater than the loss of income from the anchor tenant's lease. This is because anchor tenants drive customer traffic to the whole mall and thus increase the income of all tenants. This income is reflected in higher rents than tenants would have paid in the absence of the anchor tenant.  The anchor tenant usually captures some of this increased rental income by negotiating a lower rent for itself. But when the anchor tenant leaves, the income potential of all tenants is reduced and thus the rental income potential of the mall is reduced thereby reducing its capital value. In that case, the mall owner is made whole from the anchor tenant's breach of contract only by compensating him for the loss of income from the rental income of the mall itself, and not just the loss of income arising from the anchor tenant’s breach of the lease.  Since it would not be possible directly to calculate the loss of rental income from the anchor tenant’s breach of lease, this loss of income will be captured by proxy: by calculating the difference between the market value of the mall with the anchor tenant in place and without it.  But this is just a method of capturing lost income. The loss of rental income from the mall itself is the measure of damage in this case because as a matter of economic fact the loss of the anchor tenant causes the mall’s rental income to drop and this is a loss that the anchor tenant will have to make good because it was a natural and foreseeable consequence of its breach of the lease (as reflected in the fact that it would have paid a lower rent precisely because the other tenants were paying more as a result of its presence as an anchor tenant).

It can be inferred from the various decisions in the case of the New Famenco that the capital value of the ship was derived from the expected income it would generate over its economic life. The income expected to be obtained from leasing the ship under the charter-party did not affect this value in any way—or at least in any way that could be calculated.  What did affect the value of the ship, however, was that the market assumed that there would be more income from shipping in the future when analysed in 2007 than when analysed in 2009.  Accordingly, the capital value of the ship calculated by the present value of the anticipated future income stream from it was much greater in 2007 than in 2009.  For this reason, the owners would not have had any claim for the loss in value of the ship after the breach of the charter-party on top of the claim for lost income from the charter-party because the breach of the charter-party did not cause any such loss; equally any gain in the value of the ship over the period of its useful life after the breach would not have reduced the damages owed to the owners because such an increase in value would not have been caused by the breach of the charter-party.

Since the capital value of the ship was not increased by the income from the charter-party or decreased from the loss of income after the charter-party was breached, the fact that the owners turned their capital represented by the ship into a more liquid form of capital (cash) after the charter-party was breached therefore must be legally irrelevant. This is so whether the owners were motivated to do this because of the breach of contract, or because they thought that the market was too optimistic about the future income potential of the ship, or because they read a horoscope with potent symbolism. 

David Wingfield