For the past couple of years, I've been letting a very good book collect dust on my shelf.

A friend had told me about the book, and I did read the introduction, a wild introduction,

about the CEO of a British company who flies his private jet into the middle of the Libyan Civil War to make

an oil deal with the rebel army, an army which happened to have the covert support of the

governments of Britain, Qatar, and the U.S. So yeah, I probably should have kept reading,

but I had 30 other books I wanted to take a look at. A dirty little

secret about me, there are a lot of books where I read only the introduction or a couple

chapters, even books I like. This may strike some people as a wasteful practice, but I recommend

it. Anyway, as fascinating as I found that introduction about the oil trader in Libya, the book didn't seem relevant at that moment, but at this moment, with the U.S. signing a mineral deal with Ukraine, with Donald Trump expressing his appetite for the natural resources in Greenland and Canada, even at the bottom of the ocean.

And, of course, with an on-again, off-again trade war, the book is very relevant.

It's called The World for Sale, Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources.

So I finally took it off the shelf, read it, and, well, wow. The traders in this

book are not the kind who sit at a desk in New York or London and buy and sell the options on

commodities. These are the people who finance, procure, and trade the actual commodities. Petroleum products, agricultural products,

and metals. This is high stakes territory. If you think about a commodity trader, it has to have a bit

of the Wolf of Wall Street character. It has to have a bit of James Bond character, and it has to have a lot

of the character of pirates of the Caribbean. The authors of this book are two Bloomberg journalists

who also used to work together at the Financial Times, Javier Blas, whom you just heard, and Jack

Farchy. The main subjects of their book are trading firms that you have likely never heard of,

Glencore, Vital, Trafigura, Gunvorah Group, Mercuria, and Cargill.

These firms operate all over the world, and their reach is massive.

Here is Jack Farchie.

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