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

[Music] welcome to the latest edition of authors in conversation uh i'm ian martin editor of reaction i'm joined by javier blass co-author of the world for sale money power and the traders who barter the earth's resources meet the billionaire traders who supply the world with oil metal and food and as it says on the back of the book you've probably never heard of them they wield unimaginable political and economic power and like it or not you're one of their customers which is a good description for a fascinating book welcome javier for the uninitiated what is the world of commodity trading well the wealth commodity trading is very different to the image of wall street trading where people are in front of the computer buy and sell and selling securities and futures uh the the wall that we described of the commodity traders um is the one of uh executives who actually buy the physical stuff they buy the barrel of oil or a full tanker of oil they buy ship loads of copper or aluminium and they buy vessels full of coffee or wheat and and those are the ones who buy them whatever the production is sometimes in very remote areas of the world sometimes in very dangerous places of the world and they bring it to the consumption centers which are usually in uh europe north america and increasingly also in asia with with uh you know uh china and and india those are the commodity traders the intermediaries they they kind of they you could almost remind them as the lubricant of global commerce yeah so go going back to the to the beginning of the modern era who were the pioneers of the industry as it works now well there were a number of pioneers that we described in the book but certainly i think that everyone will will think about one of the pioneers of the industry and it really contributed to the the perception and the image of the and the reputation that the industry has it's mad rich that is the the the kind of buccaneering um commodity trader going everywhere um evading embargoes uh making a mockery of laws uh spending years as a fugitive of the of the u.s justice and it was only receive a pardon on the on the last day of the presidents of bill clinton it was almost the last act that bill clinton did when when he left the white house was to pardon an issue of full pardon for for marriage and his um partner pinky green um so they were a bit of the the pioneers uh because they invented uh the kind of the current model of the commodity trader privately owned uh with a hugely loyal and highly rewarded staff and really also the kind of a moral band of the industry where you know morality of what is good what is bad is it good to trade with russia today in the middle of the war well that's not even considered it's a it's a it's a kind of a second thought because the first thought is is it profitable to trade with um russia today and if the answer is yes it's profitable and we can make money they go there and so that that i think that you know marriage really encompassed what is today the industry and you could consider one of the pioneers of the community trading industry there were other names but but i think that marriage really is that that kind of the the the portrait of the industry and what what happened to to rich i mean it was a it was a famous case at the time wasn't at the end of the of the clinton presidency in terms of the the pardon but how was he undone well he he he got his part on but he wasn't done years earlier than that and he wasn't done by his own people by his own traders um in 1992 the company that he was presiding rich and co was under an immense pressure uh obviously because you know they were trading with in the u.s with with huge difficulties and then marriage thought that he could do a a final big deal which was a squeeze of the sink market in the in the london metal exchange here in in london he tried to corner the market drive the price of seeing um much higher than fundamentals would require kind of almost his history repeats itself because we are having almost a similar situation with with the nickel market today on the london metal exchange but he tried to do that uh he failed uh he ended losing more than 170 million dollars but more importantly his partners at marriage said this is enough we need to get control of the company from you there were a number of transactions and marriage ultimately was kicked out of his own company the company that he has founded in 1974 and the company today is very well present and we know very well about it it just came changed the name one day was called madrid and co the following day was renamed as glencore and years later a couple of decades later glencore was listed on the london stock exchange and you and i and many others here in in in the uk probably have a small piece of glencore on our pension funds and so you mentioned glencore then that there aren't there aren't many of these uh huge players i mean it's quite a concentrated industry in that sense isn't it a small group of very powerful people it's it's a small group of companies that is owned also by a small group of individuals so you take for example cargill is the world's largest agricultural trader it's a company that makes three four billion dollars a year of net profit very few people know about it it's privately owned and is owned by two branches of the same family the cargills and the mcmillans which concentrates the largest number of individuals which are billionaires on any single family on this planet outside certain monarchies certain royal families in the in the persian gulf there are 14 1 4 14 billionaires inside the cargill family individuals who have more than a billion dollars a piece um you have companies like beethoven the worst largest oil trader uh effectively headquartered in london although their incorporation is elsewhere uh owned by the staff privately owned and again a company that makes billions of dollars a year and pays uh a lot of money to their to their partners who own the company you have companies like traffic ura mercuria gumbo all privately owned all on by a few individuals and um which with huge market power or you have louis dreyfus one of the world's largest agricultural traders owned effectively by uh or call on these days because um abu dhabi has a peace but but mostly owned by margaritaville i mean we are talking about a company that is probably worth 10 billion dollars and he's owned just by one single individual but what you're describing is you described it earlier as as this industry being the almost the lubricant of globalization i i i'd scribbled down a note after going back through the book last night thinking of it as the fuel of of globalization and it is a story of globalization it is as as the global economy has transformed in the last 40 50 years those companies have been there at the heart of it now how is it that in contrast say with investment bankers of course there was a financial crisis but all sorts of other industries maybe with more of a national um focus although they have an international element to their business why is it that we here other than in in in your work at a handful of journalists we hear so little about these very very powerful people well they they really like to stay private um they're first of all they are privately owned so they don't have in general they're probably on so they don't have to do the amount of disclosure that you have to do if you are a listed company it's very different the amount of disclosure that we get today from glencore as a public company that we were getting from glencore 10 years ago before they were or 11 years ago before they were listed on the stock market i mean getting the accounts of glencore was difficult today they have to release it for for the shareholders every every six months so that is that's one of the reasons uh as as jack farty my co-author and myself found out when we started writing out the industry it's an industry that has a tendency to send a very threatening legal letter from the lawyers the moment that you start scratching on the surface or asking too many questions so they really work hard to remain uh private and under the rather because they consider that any amount of information that they gave away is going to be used by the competitors and it was an anecdote of one of the greater commodity traders of the 50s 60s all the way to the 80s called philly brothers and he's an executive that was a former ceo who told me that he considered the balance sheet of the company a secret similar to the manhattan project during the world war i mean something that only a few inside the company will know exactly and they really think that any market intelligence any information about themselves is crucial that it doesn't leak what was it like in that case then writing this book because you you've also had it's obvious incredible access and interviews some off the record but some on the record with with with leading figures but did you feel under pressure at any point or is it because you you had already developed in your day job such extraordinary contacts that um people were prepared to trust you or or were you drowning in in legal letters well i think that it was a combination of all of the above i mean certainly there were some letters uh and and you know uh difficult moments but uh in general we we jack and i cover the industry for a long time and i think that we built a recognition that we were going to be fair uh not everyone like the the final product of the book and certainly some some executives i think that will will take a while before they talk to me ever again or perhaps never uh but that does that's the job of a journalist in in in those cases but in general we were quite pleased that some of the particularly the all hands of the industry uh decided that um that there was a time to talk perhaps because some of the things that they did in the 70s and 80s well no one no no prosecutor is going to go after those anymore and they they thought that they were colorful and worth to to recount um so yeah it was it was it was um that was very pleasing and unlearned some of the sort of the the the inside the story of deals that we knew that happened but you know in general the um the the the attitude of the industry to us writing this book will be summarized uh by ian taylor the late ceo of beetle and uh a power of of the oil trading industry who who told us in one of the the interviews that we sat down with him for the book and he said well i would rather have you not write the book uh but he was i think that he he he said well you're gonna write it so i i rather try to talk to you but he said my initial uh preference will be that you you don't write this book or or another trader for for uh glencore who told us or what i'm gonna tell you will not be the whole story of of what happened there well they're gonna be things that will not tell you and they were there were moments where we will interview an executive and said hold on one second i mean you are telling me that this country in africa was selling you oil a ten dollars discount to the official price and the executive will say yes i said well how do you get that that the country sells you uh oil at below price i mean that doesn't make any sense and and he will he will smile and and and will will stay in silence and say well i don't want to tell you the secret but there are ways implying that obviously a bribe was paid uh to get that deal done so um yeah there were moments like that but um i was very happy of the amount of openness that certain people in the industry have for the book there's also that phenomenon isn't there i've i've experienced it myself where people calculate don't they that everyone else is talking or they because some of it's off the record they can't be sure even if their colleagues have said no of course i don't cooperate with books but you can never be a hundred percent sure can you that the the other the other guy isn't um giving you an account giving his side of the story so at a certain point in the production in the research of a book i certainly found people people start to come forward realizing i might as well get my version in you you are absolutely right and there were a couple of moments in which we knew that certain executives were phoning uh people who have departed the company and say do not talk to these guys and and and someone will say well i i already sat down with them for a two hour conversation but everything that i said is off the record or or you know uh and then this executive said well i will consider talking to you but you need to tell me what do you know and we'll say well no we're not going to tell you what we know but we're very happy to have a conversation so there was a certain element of that but they were they were um there were companies that really made the effort to um tell particularly uh executives who retired and left uh there was almost a ban on not talking to jack and javier for this book which uh only in some cases trigger certain executives who have left and perhaps have you know some some um accounts to settle uh and even more interest to talk to us so um at times that was almost uh making people more forthcoming to talk well the the result is that it uh it it reads like a it reads like a thriller and it's very very clearly written we're talking about the world for sale money power on the traders who barter the earth's resources um as i said it's very you know it is a really exciting uh exciting read and there's there's quite a lot of chicanery described in the book old skeletons that we referred to earlier do you do you think to what extent did the is does the industries change over the course of that 40 50 years genuine i i i think that is a some genuine change i i i have seen it over the last 20 years or so um that the things that they were okay in um in the 90s late 90s early 2000s will not be okay today i mean you you see it in particular what we are beginning to see now in russia of how careful uh all the companies are right now of what they can trade what they don't trade on russian oil on russian commodities this was happening in the war of on ukraine was happening 10 15 years or 20 years ago this was this will be a a free-for-all for the commodity traders they will just do every deal possible it will make a lot of money and they will absolutely not care about sanctions etc etc they are still some of the traders will continue because um dealing in russian oil is still legal in most jurisdictions the only countries to impose former bonds are the united states canada and to a certain extent the uk um but elsewhere you can continue but you see the reputational danger that they perceive from doing so and you see how they emphasize we are fulfilling existing contracts but we are not entering into new contracts uh 15 years ago or even 10 years ago all of them they will be entering into new contracts they will absolutely have no problem whatsoever to do that so there has been a change but uh and i am always ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the industry saying yes you change you i accept that but then you see time and time and time again behavior which is contrary to the laws and all right illegal beetle acknowledged only a few months ago that they paid bribes to secure contrast in latin america as recently as 2020. the department of justice is investigating glencore that company of madrid and already glencore has settled aside 1.5 billion dollars to pay fines that they think are going to be coming on that investigation so although i'm ready to give the benefit of the doubt to the industry and i see the behavior improving you see still companies bribing people money laundering etc etc which um when the executives of the industry tell me well but we have this horrible reputation i always say but there is a reason you have that reputation and the reason is that even people like me that give you the benefit of the doubt you from time to time come back and show that you are still paying price i'm sorry that's this you were paying price not in 1990 not in 2000 it was happening in 2020 that's about yesterday how on earth how on earth do you think the politicians or nation states can can deal with this because politicians and nation states obviously they need a free-flowing global market in these commodities the you know the idea of it being if it was possible to have it sort of centrally controlled without commodity traders and without international markets i sort of ventured i would venture to suggest it probably wouldn't be that efficient but it comes with the excesses that you describe how can politicians successfully regulate this when it is ultimately cross-border well it's complicated and it's not uh you make a very good point it is cross-border but it goes beyond that because a lot of what happened it happened really on the high seas uh the commodities changed on uh beyond the 200 nautical miles uh so it is really in no territory and a lot of the traders uh uh incorporate their companies in jurisdictions that they are quite um light touch like switzerland dubai singapore we were talking about bribery one of the things that surprised jack and i the most writing the book was the fact that um paying bribes to a businessman overseas you were a swiss company not only was legal until only a few years ago it was tax deductible so a company that was paying rise overseas will actually deduct that as an expense on their accounts which was absolutely mind-blowing and this is switzerland uh but you know it you know a lot of these companies are also incorporated in places like the bermudas british virgin islands et cetera et cetera which makes uh things more more difficult i i think that policy makers and lawmakers could try to get hold of the industry uh and the americans are doing it just through the use of the banking system at the end of the day all of these commodity flows have to be paid and they are paid through european banks and mostly in u.s dollars is putting pressure on the banks making sure that the banks are not financing anything that is questionable and checking that where the americans have had some success and i think that europeans could have a bit of success but more importantly and that was one of the reasons that we wrote the book i think the jews policy makers need to realize this sector is there is operating in the shadows they need to ask more questions about it and they needed excess i mean one of the the things that over the years made me very worried about the sector would be that and a scandal will will will happen in the commodity trading sector and i will get a phone call from a ministry uh uh a senior official from ministry of finance of a random european country and we're talking about big european countries and i i put the uk as european country and um and they will ask me for information about this trading company and what's going on and i was like well hold on one second i'm a journalist i may be relatively well informed in the sector but i i am a journalist you guys are the regulators you are the minister of finance what are you doing following me this is not how it works you know i should be asking you the questions and i kind of it was the realization that officials at senior positions in ministry of finance did not know anything about the industry and that is really the first thing that we need to change they really need to know about them and and they will if they uh they will if they read this read this book there's a lot of warfare uh in in this book and examples where you see just the sort of power of the you know the power of commodity traders um to influence the course of a course of a conflict by essentially there's the example from from libya which opens the opens the book during the libyan war and the the way in which the decision to get oil to the rebels arguably changed the um change of the course of the course of the course of the war which i i mean i would think i knew a relatively you know decent amount about politics and a little bit about international finance i hadn't really thought about it in um in those terms just a reminder i wanted to ask you in a moment about ukraine but just the way in which energy is there's one of the commodities oil energy is history energy is politics energy is is power which did make me i was i'm stunned it always astonished to see the the current uh boss of bp say that bp is um beyond politics and the the business of bp is his business rather than politics which i felt like i wanted to send him a copy of your book and a copy of daniel daniel jurgen's book the prize the story of the oil industry because polit energy is politics isn't it it is it is politics i mean you you say oil is power and that's exactly what john doyle was a very famous commodity trader of the 80s and 90s is used to define oil is monet among his power uh and and and they go hand in hand and you look at the history how commodity traders have intervened and we don't know we don't have the counter factual so we don't know how history will play out but what if kind of history is an interesting one when you involve the commodity traders i mean beetle decided to effectively provide a credit card of a billion dollars to the libyan rebels when they didn't have a central bank they were not even recognized by the international community how the libyan war will have turned out if they have not done that fidel castro when the cuban economy was on his knees uh the the soviet union have disappeared uh in in and fidel was really fearing that that was the end of queue as we know it and then the commodity traders came and devised this scheme in which they barter the the cuban sugar for oil into international market and effectively kind of kept the revolution going or you know the worst to me of the examples is the support of the commodity traders including rich to uh south africa during the upper head uh effectively really prolonging upper head and the suffering of black people in in south africa by by probably a good decade because if not the south african economy will have collapse those are examples in which the community traders have played a role and you know you mentioned ukraine i mean i don't think uh we say this in in the book i don't think there has been any western business that has done more to support vladimir putin that the community traders since he invaded uh crimea in 2014 and took and took portions of of uh of ukraine and the community traders for this last um well it is seven years they have been very very happy to support the kremlin um with many many deals you mentioned putin there where is the rise of russia as a petrol uh gas superpower and china is a genuine economic superpower figure in this story well um both are very important i mean for for for the commodities um russia has been for the community traders russia has been a huge source of material to trade around so since particularly the collapse of the soviet union that kind of centrally planned economy was taken over by the commodity traders who acted as the conduits to the soviet or now the russian attack ukrainian communities into the international market it was the commodity traders who first discovered the initial businessman which were really little businessman at that time but they transformed into the oligarchs and you know there's the the former head of the office of glencore in moscow saying we as glencore we uh sponsor the first oligarchs we gave them the finance we gave them the credit lines and we told them how to how to do it and i looked at the role that the oligarchs have played since then into the russian into the russian economy and you know there is a reason why ivan glasenberg the former ceo of glencore got the medal of friendship of the of the russian federation by no other than vladimir putin and a ceremony on the kremlin this is the role that the commodity traders were playing it was he was named a friend of russia uh all of them were doing a lot of business and when when companies like i mean it's an example of uh rosnef which is the big russian oil company needed to raise 10 billion dollars in short notice in the market and there was no international bank after crimea that was going to give rosneff um 10 billion dollars but the community traders were there i mean they're acting as banks they landed rosnef 10 billion dollars and china well china has been the the boom of community markets it just uh you look at china in the early 1990s it was importing the amount of copper that a small medium-sized european country like like belgium so it was kind of an afterthought the office in asia of all the big commodity trading houses was not in china or singapore it was in tokyo that was the country to be japan uh since then all changed and china completely changed the market and and you look at for example the copper market it went from being uh buying the equivalent of a small medium-sized european country to be half of the market and that half of the market has been supplied by commodity traders linking in the process a lot of latino american countries a lot of african countries with with china wouldn't commodity traders say well look people were happy to go along with this the political class most of us as consumers because you had this scenario post the early 90s you had the scenario where where russia could gradually you know supply more energy um ensuring the energy prices stayed relatively relatively low some fluctuations and then china is being supercharged by commodities and it's the growth of its manufacturing industry so china's providing the energy to large parts of the west germany um particularly sorry russia is and then china is is then providing the goods the cheap goods for for import so to an extent everyone's happy until we get to now and we get to the invasion of ukraine i was going to ask you do you think and i've been kicking this around a lot and i don't know the answer um because it may be that in the first phase of the war it feels like a bigger economic change than it turns out to be i don't know but it at least feels possible to me that both sides of those story both sides of that story russia and china we're going to see europe if not entirely sealed off but maybe europe america a few other developed economies emphasizing it for the next decade or more a degree a greater degree of self-reliance in terms of energy supply commodities and imported goods so it does properly start to feel like the the end of globalization by which i i don't mean there'll be no trade there was trade and there were deals during the cold war but the whole process goes into reverse it does feel like that and i think that probably when when historians look at these with that kind of wide-angle lens that the the pass of time gives you say you know 100 years from now i i don't know that would be the war of ukraine i think that there has been and you could go almost 14 years ago and i think that it will be a a progression progression of deterioration of globalization that probably will will start perhaps with the global financial crisis and that kind of you know shaking the financial globalization and and putting uh middle-class working-class in a lot of trouble and the years that went through the you know the various low recovery from the the global financial crisis then the trump presidency perhaps is another step and then perhaps will be the russian invasion of ukraine at kind of the final chapter of that process over 14 15 years that kind of reverse or stop at least the forces of globalization i don't think that globalization is going to stop completely because there are a lot of things that that go with globalization and writing the book to us was very apparent i mean you know the community traders of yesterday ah communicated with with their offices by by uh by postcard by by by post and they will send letters that they will take three or four weeks to arrive to chile and then they came to telegram and then they came to telephone and then they came the internet um so certainly all of those telecommunication advances that really reduce distances are not gonna go away uh flying around it's not going to go away i mean executives from there from the 50s and 60s were telling us of what kind of adventure it was just to travel to china in 1960 or to um the chilean um atacama they said or the copper mines at that time and it was just really trans oceanic uh flying around it was not that easy all of that is not gonna go away but but a lot of the consensus the political consensus of our freer trade and in a way some kind of you know convergence towards democracy that certainly hasn't stopped a final um final question really about the impact of the war or actually just what preceded the war because your twitter account which had always been a must follow as the energy crisis has taken off pre-war became even more a must uh must follow as you were charting very often ahead of a lot of you know mid-market media all the political class you would you were pointing out to people just the scale of these movements that have been been going on in in energy markets so there was a squeeze coming anyway and it's now going to be much bigger as a result of of the war what do you i mean how do you think the long term and short short term and long term consequences of this will play out in the short term how bad is it going to get and in the long term how will it remake the markets well i mean in the short term i'm afraid that it looks bad uh i mean people put the analogy of the 1970s oil crisis but the difference of that was that it mostly affected you soil and now we have a number of other commodities that i play natural gas electricity i mean i i am deeply concerned about electricity prices because i feel and particularly here in the uk that while we use experience and we are getting the first you know utility bills for the new prices from april but that is going to be the kind of a small price increase compared what is coming later in october if the war continues and and prices forward prices for electricity uh you know continue to be as high as they are i mean i'm afraid that the consequences of the war is going to be that everything is going to get more expensive basic foundations of the global economy in terms of natural resources are getting extremely expensive and we we focus usually on oil but you look at the steel which is everywhere from the you know reinforced rod for for uh for making reinforced concrete to to a washing machine to a car everything 60 of the way of a car is still and the price of a steel has gone up in the last 24 months about 250 percent so either the car companies are going to take a squeeze on the profit margin or a car is going to be more expensive in the next couple of years i mean in general everything is going to be more expensive um i think that there are two consequences on the long term one is that um security of supply it's gonna be a lot more important that used to be i mean this is the kind of thing that people at nato would be discussing from every two or three years and making this kind of war games what if russia suffers a coup d'etat and everything is is now in trouble but it was just kind of theoretical exercises confined to war planners who would have to think about what if now i think it's just going to be elected officials at the at the residence of the prime minister in each european country which is going to think okay what is our security of supply not use of oil and natural gas but what about copper what about aluminium what about steel what about wheat things that we have not really considered in uh european politics for the last 45 50 years that is gonna come into place and with energy security it's gonna be a very difficult conversation on climate change and the fight against climate change what do you put how do you weight do we need to produce more oil at home how that compares to our preferences for fighting climate change so we do more renewals but renewables also means a lot of steel so how we balance that i i fear that the conversation at the next cop meeting previous one cop 26 in glasgow was very uh um in some ways exuberant and you know countries promising we're gonna do this and we're gonna do that and i have huge doubts at the time because i i already as you say you know i was already seeing a very tight energy market in particular going forward and i have huge doubts that a lot of the promises on climate change were delivered we could deliver them yeah are you watching yeah watch it watching your twitter feed seeing your twitter feed during the cop 26 period the run up to it and during it and afterwards the whole thing it had a sort of fantasy eclair feel to it okay the cop 26 was happening above all in kind of alice and wonderland it just didn't really connect to the markets as as i was seeing them and i'm unafraid and you know with with the inside now that you know talking to policy makers a lot of people knew very well what was going on but there was a lot of political momentum and desire to make cop 26 a great success but countries on the run up to cop26 knew very well that oil supply was a problem that gas supply was a problem that shutting down nuclear power station was not a great idea putting aside the war in ukraine i think that also the war in ukraine has provided certain european countries without trying to find the world here because it's not an elegant wars are not elegance ever even as excuse but it's a convenient excuse to turn around and say guess what we are going to reconsider our whole nuclear policy uh we are going to keep our nuclear reactors for another 10 years like belgium or germany is also reconsidering it's a lot easier to tell a green party we really need to reconsider nuclear policy because of the war in ukraine that say we need to reconsider our nuclear policy it's just because the supply and demand of global gas and global energy and global electricity do not ask and we have known that for the last couple of years but but we really didn't want to say anything and i think that the world is being used by by some governments to turn around things that otherwise would have happened in any case are you surprised that hasn't really happened yet in the uk we're here we're here talk of an of a new energy security strategy they're clearly from what i know uh you know a little bit about what's um about the discussion that they're having that they're kind of arguing with each other and testing the boundaries of what's acceptable but what was supposed to be announced a week ago or a few days ago is delayed and and and and delayed it does seem like a moment where and germany did it on defense and is potentially is starting to do it on energy it does feel like a moment in the uk where you need that declaration the tv address saying listen the world has just been being transformed but i just just just final question then what do the commodity traders and the people that we've been talking about what do they do in this circumstance well uh they are they're used to change uh they they always say that they start the year with a blank piece of paper uh with you know a line that say expenses x and then they start trying to make money and every year the money comes from a different market i mean one year uh the lng market or the gas market may be very profitable another year oil so it's profitable another year is aluminium so they are very good at be super flexible super nimble uh and and to adapt to change but traders um they benefit whenever is prices are volatile and whenever it is also tension that having access to the commodity has a premium just having that access holding it and the traders are the ones that are the the closest to the commodities so um what they're doing right now is making a lot of money but um i'm probably 2022 may turn to be the most profitable year ever for the industry 2021 was already the most profitable year for the industry however there is a big cabaret this time and is that the financing needs to make it to the end of the year are so great because the volatility is triggering margin calls liquidity is very thin the banks are very nervous that it may be the best year but you need to survive to the end of the year to collect your wins and i don't know if everyone in the industry is going to survive to the end of the year i mean this is the time when we may see a commodity trading house go down interesting i mean there's also that danger isn't there that and this may not happen but you could you could get into a situation where inflation exceeds expectations sort of substantially above 10 or sort of 10 11 12 and that then has for the reason that you described earlier it's it's the steel that's needed for cars it's everything that we consume becomes more expensive huge dent to industrial and consumer confidence it's not unimaginable that that then tips in the second half of the year into flatlining or something close to recession or maybe even recession now in those circumstances of course there's opportunity for some but it is there's a lot of danger in there as well i have to say this is uh a highly recommended book for me the world for sale money power and the traders who barter the earth's resources i want to thank the co-author javier blass for a fascinating conversation thank you for spending time with us i'm ian martin editor of reaction you're watching authors in conversation with me if you're not a subscriber to reaction on youtube you just hit the button below and become a subscriber and also if you want to get my weekly newsletter on politics economics culture all sorts of things you just go to the address below and become a subscriber you also get all the other great stuff from the reaction team but javier thank you very much for spending the time thank you for having me and and to those of you watching and listening thank you uh for joining us until next time [Music]

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Keywords: commodities, commodities trading, javier blas, javier blas the world, the world for sale book, javier blas bloomberg, javier blas author, javier blas books, javier blas interview, the world for sale, finance, business, author interviews, iain martin, reaction news, authors in conversation

Id: 54Uod2pE37Y

Length: 43min 39sec (2619 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022