The World For Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, reviewed

We look at this interesting and wide ranging book by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, published by Random House Business, £20 Hardback

The World For Sale reviewed

You might want to get you atlas out when you read this book, as it truly pings you all around the world and back again. The authors Javier Blas and Jack Farchy truly take you on a decades spanning global tour of resource rich hotspots, blended with secret Iran – Israeli underwater oil pipelines. Ocean going oil tankers mysteriously go off the radar for four weeks and then reappear, with mysteriously empty holds. It did feel like you were on a site scouting tour for a potential James Bond film.

This book is well researched, the stories are well presented and the narrative is clearly presented. It is breath taking at times where these ambitious commodity traders went, and the deals they pulled off, to extract raw commodities, from, often desperate sellers, and the various shenanigans they had to pull off to be able to eventually recoup their expenditures.

Blas and Farchy’s overall narrative brings us to more recent times where they suggest that the use of economical power by the Obama era government has made these type of deals a thing of the past. It is hard to imagine that this sort of wheeling and dealing has completely ended, but the behaviour of many of these companies founders was no longer acceptable as time past and standards changed. The audacity of some of the deals achieved is impressive, entertaining, and often morally dubious, and Blas and Farchy recount these stories well.

The authors have done well to extract insights and quotes from many of the players involved, especially as a number have since died too. At times you did wonder if there would be more of an analysis of the dubious moral nature of many of these deals, but it seems like their sources were only willing to give away so much information. Nor have their billions of wealth personally gathered resulted in much self reflection or consideration of the wider impact of their actions.

As Blas and Farchy do outline, dumping deeply toxic waste in a highly unsuitable West African city, while provoking massive international outrages, and fines, did not necessarily result at anyone getting fired from the commodity dealers who arrange the deal. It is a good read, and, with good reason the type of book that often ends up on the business book of the year shortlists.

Book blurb

The modern world is built on commodities – from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones.

We rarely stop to consider where they come from. But we should.

In The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth’s resources.

It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trade, and connecting resource-rich countries – no matter how corrupt or war-torn – with the world’s financial centres.

And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of Western regulators and politicians – helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fuelling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funnelling cash to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin in spite of strict sanctions.

The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

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