Alexandra Lin

“Glasenberg’s bet on buying assets a decade earlier now helped to deliver profits for Glencore that surpassed even Marc Rich’s golden years. In 2003, the company’s net income exceeded $1 billion for the first time, and the following year it was more than $2 billion, and in 2007 the trading house made $6.1 billion.38”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“In the decade to 2011, the world’s largest oil, metal and agricultural trading houses – Vitol, Glencore and Cargill, respectively – enjoyed a combined net income of $76.3 billion (see table on page 332). That was an astonishing amount of money. It was ten times the profits the traders were generating in the 1990s.16 It was more than either Apple or Coca-Cola made over the same period.17 And it would have been enough money to buy entire titans of corporate America, such as Boeing or Goldman Sachs.18”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“But in coal, with no futures market, there was nowhere to place a bet on rising prices. The only way was to buy entire mines. So that’s what Glasenberg did. Over the next four years he bought more than a dozen mines in Australia and South Africa, in addition to deals in Colombia.”
― Javier Blas, The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources

“I don’t know, reading about this horrible stuff, knowing that life went on and the world just kept on turning. It was really fucking depressing but it also ... it was quite comforting, as well. In like, a bleak way.”
― Eliza Clark, Penance