The Hidden Plumbing of Commodity Finance
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We talk about the commodity supply chain all the time. We talk about the ports and the trucks and the ships and all of that. But there's another dimension to moving commodities all around the world, which is actually paying for it. Who funds the oil tanker and what happens when that tanker is, say, stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Commodity finance underpins production, transportation and storage of a wide variety of the things that make the modern world, but you tend to only hear about it when things go wrong. Today we speak with Lewis Hart, head of corporate advisory and banking at Brown Brothers Harriman. We discuss how the business of commodity finance actually works, how risk is priced, what makes for a good or bad warehouse, and the difference between financing a commodity you can hedge (like oil) versus one where's there's no futures market (like cashews).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oddlots is brought to you by Vanek. For years, investors basically forgot about real assets, |
| 0:05.3 | energy, gold, and infrastructure. But look at what's driving markets now. Central banks loading up |
| 0:10.5 | on gold, massive capex cycles, currencies doing weird things, these assets are at the center of it. |
| 0:17.1 | RACS, the Vanek Real Assets ETF is an actively managed one-stop shop for real assets, |
| 0:22.6 | spanning gold, commodities, natural resource equities, and more. |
| 0:26.1 | Go to vanek.com slash RAAX pod to learn more. |
| 0:30.8 | Fun disclosures later in this episode. |
| 0:33.8 | Some follow the noise. |
| 0:36.3 | Bloomberg follows the money. |
| 0:38.5 | Because behind every headline is a bottom line. |
| 0:42.3 | Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, |
| 0:46.9 | there's a money side to every story. |
| 0:49.6 | And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. |
| 0:53.9 | Get the money side of the story. |
| 0:56.0 | Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. |
| 1:03.2 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. |
| 1:08.1 | Music Radio News Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. |
| 1:21.6 | I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 1:22.7 | And I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 1:24.1 | Joe, I think I've told you this before, but way back when I was starting in |
| 1:28.7 | financial journalism, I really wanted to be a commodities reporter. I get it. It's a, it seems fun, |
| 1:33.8 | it seems real. It seems like one of the few areas of finance that's like not just a screen, |
... |
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