The World for Sale
Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Having read it
★★★★☆
Certainly readable and almost like a work of fiction in its scope and nefarious happenings and that you want to know what might happen next.
The ne’er-do-wells investigated and written about in the commodity trading world(s) clearly just operate like they’re gamblers and nothing else matters (even planet Earth) beyond making a profit out of freely garnered planetary resources (oh, and proving some kind of point to themselves and/or others).
Did I mention they also like to make a bit more profit if they can, even by ‘making bets’ in and around financial and political goings on in the world and anything else that might occur is not their problem as it was all perfectly legal anyway.
Well worth a read, certainly for its sort of history lessons about the early twentieth century years of commodity trading and how it reveals a previously hidden world to us and one that seem integral to the running of it but really deserves to change (or be ended); the tendrils of capitalism aren’t a great help, either.
In conclusion though, it has a good conclusion that seems to paint a picture of hope and real (but inevitably and no doubt slow) change that’ll lead to better ways of operating.
A good passage
In Iraq, the commodity traders helped Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, bypassing UN sanctions; in Cuba, they swapped sugar for oil with Fidel Castro, helping to keep the Communist revolution alive; and they secretly sold millions of tonnes of US wheat and corn to the Soviet Union, propping up Moscow at the height of the Cold War. When Igor Sechin, the boss of Russian oil giant Rosneft and an ally of President Vladimir Putin, needed to raise $10 billion in short order, whom did he call? The commodity traders.
They are the last swashbucklers of global capitalism: willing to do business where other companies don’t dare set foot, thriving through a mixture of ruthlessness and personal charm. But while the importance of the commodity traders has grown in recent decades, their numbers have remained relatively small: a large share of the world’s traded resources is handled by just a few companies, many of them owned by just a few people.
A second good passage
Commodity traders had been willing to put themselves and their money in places few others dared to tread since at least the days of Theodor Weisser’s trip to the Soviet Union. And since at least the 1980s, they’d been arranging financing for more challenging countries by using the flow of commodities as a guarantee. In the early 19805, for example, Marc Rich + Co agreed to advance about $80 million to Angola’s government in the midst of a civil war. It was one of the first times that a country’s oil had been used as security for a loan – a type of deal that would, in later years, become enormously popular.7
Now, the industry’s shift towards raising outside capital – epitomised by Glencore’s IPO in 2011 – had handed the commodity traders unprecedented clout. American pension funds would not have dreamt of lending to Marc Rich + Co. But they were happy to put their money in a vehicle created and controlled by its modern incarnation. After all, their reasoning might have gone, Glencore was a public company and a constituent of the prestigious FTSE 100.
Their new financial might made the commodity traders an even more important part of the global economic system, and it gave them the means to influence global politics as never before. The traders were guided by money, but in their pursuit of profit they inevitably played a political role. Suddenly, they had the financial means to bankroll entire countries, to provide access to the global financial system for individuals and countries that had previously been frozen out of it, and even to play a decisive role in politically charged conflicts, such as Libya’s civil war or Kurdistan’s independence struggle. From their comfortable offices in London, Zug and Houston, the traders were shaping history.