The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodities Traders

by Kate Kelly

Overview

“Thanks to this gripping new book … we know more about how they do it. And it’s even more shocking than you think.” —The Independent

When most people think of the drama of global finance, they think of stocks and bonds, venture capital, high-tech IPOs, and complex mortgage-backed securities. But commodities? Crude oil and soybeans? Copper and wheat? What could be more boring?

That’s exactly what the elite commodity traders want you to think. They don’t seek the media spotlight. They don’t want to be as famous as Warren Buffett or Bill Gross. Their astonishing wealth was created in near-total obscurity, either in closely held private companies or deep within large banks and corporations, where commodity profits and losses weren’t broken out.

Now Kate Kelly, the bestselling author of Street Fighters, takes us inside this secretive inner circle that controls so many things we all depend on. She gets closer than any previous reporter to understanding these whip-smart, aggressive, and often egomaniacal men who bet millions every day on a blend of facts, analysis, and pure gut instinct.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591847137
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/16/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,099,174
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

KATE KELLY, author of the New York Times bestseller Street Fighters, covers Wall Street for CNBC. She spent ten years at the Wall Street Journal, where she won a Livingston Award and two Gerald Loeb awards. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters ix

Preface xiii

Author's Note xvii

1 The Bubble 1

2 The Speculator 18

3 The Firm That Marc Rich Built 45

4 The Banks 65

5 The Regulators 85

6 The Hedger 105

7 The Wilderness Year 124

8 Goldman Sachs 141

9 The Deal 157

10 The Reformer 181

11 The Side Bet 204

12 The Pop 222

Acknowledgments 231

Notes 235

Index 253

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Praise for Kate Kelly’s New York Times Bestseller Street Fighters:

“It overstates nothing to call Kelly’s book brilliantly reported, and her narrative is grippingly propulsive and peopled with fascinatingly drawn characters.”
—Los Angeles Times

“The twists and turns of those frantic few days make for lively reading.”
—The New York Times

“Kelly takes us inside Bear’s last, dizzying days. . . .The real draw is the book’s surgical detail.”
—Time

“There’s so much to like in this book—lively anecdotes, crisp pacing, and brevity . . . a highly accessible narrative for the general reader.”
—Bloomberg News

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Kate Kelly’s New York Times Bestseller Street Fighters:

“It overstates nothing to call Kelly’s book brilliantly reported, and her narrative is grippingly propulsive and peopled with fascinatingly drawn characters.”
—Los Angeles Times

“The twists and turns of those frantic few days make for lively reading.”
—The New York Times

“Kelly takes us inside Bear’s last, dizzying days. . . .The real draw is the book’s surgical detail.”
—Time

“There’s so much to like in this book—lively anecdotes, crisp pacing, and brevity . . . a highly accessible narrative for the general reader.”
—Bloomberg News

From the Publisher

2014-05-07
CNBC business reporter Kelly (Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Sterns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street, 2009) takes on the world of commodity traders and the controversies swirling around it.The author profiles a world in which large-scale bets on market volatility and careful calculation of hedged positions are often upset by unexpected developments: geopolitical or other kinds of crisis, human overconfidence, bad luck, etc. Kelly introduces many world-class market movers, including Marc Rich, the longtime fugitive and former owner of trading company Glencore, and Gary Cohn, the president and COO of Goldman Sachs, which was investigated for manipulating supplies of aluminum. The dizzying rise of oil prices in the late 2000s and their equally precipitous slide provides a frame in which Kelly takes up the question of whether commodity trading is speculative and/or beneficial. Traders like London hedge fund operator Pierre Andurand move billions of dollars with their intuitive bets and lead excessively lavish lifestyles. The author provides insight into the various levels of the world of commodities, from raw materials production to futures contracts and the derivatives based on them. Kelly chronicles efforts to regulate these markets—especially during Gary Gensler's tenure at the Commodity Futures Trade Commission—and she also details the depths of continuing opposition. Especially intriguing is the underlying narrative regarding the persistence of the chaotic feedback from the combined effects of disparate individuals, markets and events. "A true knack for wagering on the price vicissitudes of crude, copper, or cotton remain[s] a profitable skill in almost any environment—especially when only a handful of individuals in the world [can] really do it well and on a large scale."A lively contribution to an ongoing debate that features the unforeseen as much as the deliberate.

Kirkus Reviews