The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
It's a fair bet you've never heard of the people who actually run the world. Not politicians, not tech billionaires. The commodity traders. These are the individuals quietly buying and selling the oil, grain, and metal that keeps civilisation ticking, and this book pulls back the curtain on how they've done it, often by methods that will make your jaw drop. Journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy trace the rise of these extraordinarily powerful figures through decades of geopolitical chaos. Funnelling money to a sanctions-hit Kremlin, cutting deals with Libyan rebels mid-revolution, cosying up to Russian oligarchs as the Soviet Union crumbled. These aren't fictional plot lines. They happened. The authors document them with the kind of detail that gives the whole thing an unsettling, thriller-like quality. The result is something genuinely hard to put down. Short on jargon, long on incident, the book moves from oilfields to wheatfields with real pace. As the Spectator put it, it's a globe-spanning corporate thriller full of intrigue, and it changes how you see the world, often in uncomfortable ways. With food and energy insecurity increasingly shaping daily life, understanding who controls these supply chains feels less like curiosity and more like necessity. This book makes that complex picture surprisingly readable. A Financial Times and Economist Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, it's one of those rare works of non-fiction that reads like le Carré. Except every word of it is true.
- Author: Jack Blas, Javier, Farchy
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Economics
- ISBN: 978-1847942678
- Pages: 416 pages