I don't buy it.
Boom & bust cycles are driven by the fundamental difficulty of quantifying value. Since there is no true value, people base their opinions on those of others (+delay), leading to "inertia," leading to oscillation. The government might exacerbate the oscillations, but the lion's share of responsibility lies with the market. Complaining that the oscillations happen because the market "just isn't free enough" represents a delusion about the qualities of free markets.
As for make-work, it's a compromise that nobody is happy with, but it is a compromise, and that's its value proposition. Some want to let the market clear without intervention by any means necessary, regardless of the social cost, based on (arguably misplaced) faith that this will ultimately make things better. Others think it's ridiculous that periodically attacking the foundation-tier Maslow needs of large swaths of the population is "a feature not a bug," and demand (arguably unsustainable) social policy to fix it. Make-work lies between the "free-market reckoning" and "re-distributional cash grant" extremes and so once the dust of democratic process has settled it's the thing that actually happens even though both sides see it as a poor alternative to their favored solution.
> The Baltic dry should be studied in conjunction with other indicators such as yield curves and indications of credit tightness.
The Baltic dry should be studied in conjunction with the reliable unreliability of the market in general. Since markets are as inherently unavoidable as physics or politics, we cannot simply wish them away. Instead, we should develop social policy to decouple the markets for well-understood core needs-providing infrastructure from the global economy in order to place bounds on the social cost of market corrections, which could then be allowed to happen (otherwise) unimpeded.