Javier Blas

“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.” Read more...

The Best Business Books: the 2021 FT & McKinsey Book Award

Andrew Hill, Journalist