The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity.

For the past couple 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 C.E.O. 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 of chapters, even books I like.) 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 — as the U.S. signs a mineral deal with Ukraine; with Donald Trump expressing his appetite for the natural resources in Greenland, in 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," says Javier Blas, one of the two authors of The World for Sale. "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."

Blas's coauthor is Jack Farchy; they're both Bloomberg journalists who also used to work together at the Financial Times.The main subjects of their book are trading firms that you’ve likely never heard of: Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura, Gunvor Group, Mercuria, and Cargill. These firms operate all over the world, and their reach is massive. Farchy: "The revenues of the four largest is just under a trillion dollars last year. Which in terms of global exports would make them I think the fourth-largest country, behind the U.S., China, and Germany, and ahead of Japan."

Have you ever thought that you really understood something, that you were looking into the heart of it, only to realize that you were just looking at the surface layer? That’s the sensation I had while reading The World for Sale. These commodity traders are often at the center of big political and economic events — civil wars and military coups seem to be a specialty; but they usually operate deep in the shadows. On this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, we try to shine a light.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of,” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

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