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

CNBC reporter Kelly (Street Fighters) offers brief portraits of successful traders from the lightly regulated world of commodity trading, where deals for oil, copper, and livestock are engineered for billions in profits. Much of the action described took place during a post-2001 boom that prompted major investment banks to get in on the action, and spurred regulators to try curbing the potential fallout from wild market swings that “created kings in the trading world’s empowered class and drove other people and companies into financial ruin.” Kelly presents mostly admiring portraits of obscure but rich financiers. There’s a false familiarity with these elites, as seen in details of extravagant wedding costs, and efforts to provide balance through sketches of would-be reformers such as Gary Gensler, former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, fail to round out the choppy narrative. Apart from references to $4 per gallon gasoline during speculation-fueled price spikes and rising costs to Coca-Cola after a bottleneck in aluminum supplies, Kelly does not fully demonstrate the practical costs to the rest of the world. The need for access to her subjects forces her, like much of the rest of the financial press, to pull her punches. Agent: Bob Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (June)