How societal decisions ACTUALLY get made -- The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

[Ashwani Vasishth]

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.

Stephen J. Dubner

May 23, 2025

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."

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

by Javier Blas (Author), Jack Farchy (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

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The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they have come from. But we should. In
The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the world economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth's resources. It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trade, and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centres. And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of western regulators and politicians - helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fuelling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funnelling cash to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin in spite of western sanctions. The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

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     Ashwani
        Vasishth         vasi...@ramapo.edu          (323) 206-1858 (Cell Phone)
                   http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
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                      Professor of Sustainability
                      http://ramapo.edu/ramapo-green
                     http://ramapo.edu/sustainability

You can ALWAYS set up an Appointment with me, without negotiation, seven days a week,
           at: https://calendly.com/vasishth/half-hour-webex-meeting

                       Ramapo College of New Jersey
              505 Ramapo Valley Road, SSHS, Mahwah, NJ 07430
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I respectfully acknowledge that Ramapo College is located on the ancestral and traditional Indigenous territory of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation.