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

"One of the reasons it made the shortlist is because it absolutely fulfils that criteria of the award, going back to when we started it in 2005, that it’s compelling and enjoyable to read. The episode you just described is typical. It’s by two former FT journalists, now working for Bloomberg , who have used their knowledge of the commodity world to tell a story. It’s not only a very useful history of what has happened in commodities markets since World War II , but it also unearths some of the extraordinary stories and figures that worked at or led some of these big commodity trading houses. Their underlying point is that there’s a reason why these big commodities houses have minted so many billionaires and multimillionaires. It’s not only that commodities were in an extraordinary boom at a critical point after the 1970s into the early 2000s, but also that these figures were extraordinary. They were massive risk-takers, amoral people prepared to do deals with baddies to turn a commodity—be it oil, gas, coal or precious metals—into cash, and adopting the most extraordinary strategies to do so. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter That includes the ones who weren’t prepared to fly into war zones. I love the story of the guy who ran Phibro Energy, who was essentially working from a screen in Connecticut, but managed to see that there was a way of stocking oil in oil tankers. He bought up extraordinary amounts of oil—waiting for what he correctly predicted: war in the Middle East in 1990 and a sudden supply squeeze when he could offload it all—and stored the oil in tankers around the world. It requires a certain risk-taking chutzpah to do that. This book paints that rollercoaster world of commodity trading rather brilliantly, I think. Yes. There are things going on in Congo. The famous oil-for-food scandal in Iraq is touched on. It’s a question of spotting an opportunity and not actually caring much about what the politics might be or the people you might have to deal with. Right at the beginning, the authors point out that of course nobody really wanted to talk to them. Most of these companies are privately held or were when they started their work. Nobody really wanted to talk about what goes on. It was quite a job of investigation."