The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources by Javier Class and Jack Farchy

Prior to diving into this weighty tome, I had two pertinent insights into the world of commodity trading.  First, was from a friend called Ernie (not his real name) who went into Sugar Trading soon after graduating.  We would often meet up for drinks when he had just got back from Mogadishu, Tashkent, or some other place I had never heard of, having spent three weeks trying to negotiate the release of some mega-shipment of cane on a ship ‘delayed’ off the coast of East Africa. At that time, I was working for an Accountancy firm, hiring trainees, so I struggled to make my recruitment ‘milk-round’ travails have the same sense of adventure and glamour as his. Ernie told me that one year while travelling extensively, he had claimed more in laundry expenses than he had earned that year in base salary.  I was, of course, doubtful until he told me that he sometimes flew Business Class with his mother’s curtains and bath-towels in his excess luggage.  The second pertinent insight was from the movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, which featured irritating people becoming (or ceasing to be) profoundly rich by making predictions about what would happen with the “Russian harvest”, or the market for “Pork Bellies.”  On the basis of these two key insights, Javier Blas and Jack Flashy (both journalists at Bloomberg News) did not need to serve up much in their new book to improve my smarts. Thankfully, they did so much more.    

This book is terrific, well-told, engaging, deeply disturbing and somehow titillating all at the same time.  Imagine if Robert Harris and Frederic Forsyth teamed up to write a business book?  This is it.  International trade, covert crime, dastardly villains, exotic locations, super-yachts and unimaginable wealth form the back-drop to a series of stories about a handful of powerful people and organisations you may have never heard of.  It even has a Bond style Swiss headquartered super-villain with a non—ironic name; Mark Rich.  While we might berate the CEOs of public listed companies for their multi-million bonus, we may well have missed reports that the 13 partners at Glencore were worth 29  billion dollars.  We can easily revile, or rejoice in the genius, of Musk or Zuckerberg or Gates, but they are at least huge public-profile figures, hauled before Senate Committees, examined to death in the business media, while their personal lives are fodder for the tabloids and gossip columnists.  But could I name any one of the dozen of so billionaires featured here who control the vast majority of the world’s resources, precious metals and food-stuffs?   Not one of them.  

This is a book as much about geo-politics, social upheaval and the causes and consequences of war, as it is about business and commerce.  After a while, it becomes wearying in the scope of these traders machinations; the Arab Spring, the collapse of the Soviet Union; the burning oil-fields of Iraq.  I almost expected a Chapter on these guys being responsible for global warming and COVID-19.  If nothing else, my sense of geography improved as I hopped from Libya to Cuba to Russia and Kurdistan. It paints a picture of commodity trading like a perverse dystopian global silk road, trodden by an unknown elite of super-smart, opaque in their moral compass and enviably brilliant at the same time.  The sequence which covers the collapse of the Soviet Union which had three outcomes; massive social upheaval, the emergence of power oligarchs and the enrichment of the traders to levels never dreamed of even a decade earlier.  The fact that one of them is unceremoniously shot in a Russian airport is almost only mentioned as a footnote.  An extraordinarily good book which should be best consumed in the First Class lounge of a far-flung airport (when that kind of indulgence is allowed again).

John Dore