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The Secret Club That Runs the World

The Secret Club That Runs the World

Kate Kelly
2014
T3 264 pages · about 4h 24m to read Open Librarygoodreads

Commodity desks at banks and funds after the 2008 boom.

Summary

Kate Kelly, a financial reporter, examines the physical commodity trading business and the people who run it, at a point when regulatory pressure was pushing banks out of the activity and independent trading houses were expanding.

Her subjects include the large independent traders, principally Glencore, Vitol and Trafigura, and their business, which combines physical logistics with trading positions informed by what the logistics reveals. She explains how a firm that owns storage, ships and processing capacity knows things about supply and demand that no financial trader can observe, and how that information advantage is the basis of the business. She covers the banks' commodity desks, particularly at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan, and the regulatory and political pressure that followed the aluminium warehousing controversy and the questions about bank ownership of physical assets.

The book follows individuals, including Blythe Masters at JPMorgan and traders at hedge funds and merchant houses, and covers the Glencore initial public offering and the Xstrata merger. It is journalism rather than analysis of commodity market structure, and readers wanting the economics should go elsewhere. Its value is the description of how physical trading firms convert logistics into information and how that differs from financial speculation, which most commentary on commodity markets conflates.

Key takeaways 7

  1. Physical commodity traders derive their advantage from logistics assets that reveal supply and demand information no financial trader can observe.
  2. Ownership of storage, shipping and processing is what makes a commodity trading position informed rather than speculative.
  3. Regulatory pressure after 2010 pushed banks out of physical commodity activity and transferred the business to less regulated independents.
  4. The aluminium warehousing controversy concerned whether owning storage allowed firms to affect the prices they traded against.
  5. Commodity trading firms are private and disclose little, which makes their positions and profits invisible to markets they influence.
  6. Kelly's account distinguishes physical trading from financial speculation, which most commentary on commodity markets conflates.
  7. Glencore's public listing required disclosing a business that had operated on secrecy, which changed how it could operate.

Who should read it

Investors and analysts of commodity markets who want to understand how physical trading firms differ from financial participants.

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Commissioned history, written long before the run.

Where it sits in the reference 2

Commodities generally
Assets
Bankers, financiers and Wall Street firms
Financial history

Topics

Finance and MarketsSociology and CultureWealth, poverty and inequality