633. The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of

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 CEO 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, Cutter and the US, 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 chapters, even books I like.

This may strike some people as a wasteful practice, but I recommend it. 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, with the US signing a mineral deal with Ukraine, with Donald Trump expressing his appetite for the natural resources in Greenland and 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 of 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.

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