The World For Sale is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Growing up on a farm I was familiar with Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Having worked on the trading floor system for the Chicago Stock Exchange I was pretty familiar with trading and the financial markets, especially the “If we aren’t currently under indictment for it then it must be legal” mentality. Commodity traders take that beyond Olympic levels.
One of my favorite podcasts, Freakonomics, turned me onto this book. They even have an episode speaking with one of the authors.
Information is Profit
This book starts around 1954, covering truly shady (to put it politely) deals for Russian oil. It also continually reminds us that information, not commodities, is how commodity traders made their biggest profits. At more than one point it talks about how the CIA used to come to the trader’s offices in Switzerland. Traders made obscene profits by creating global communications networks with their offices all over the world. This included some God forsaken shit-holes where a phone line previously had not been a dream.
Boots on the ground paying bribes and keeping dictators in power was how the most profitable commodity deals happened. In Switzerland bribes were booked as “Facilitation Fees” and were tax deductable.
Sanctions are Nothing
There are quite a few details in here about evading sanctions. Basically, when insert-country-here, calls for international sanctions on, say, Russia or Iran, other countries don’t join in. The traders would just set up a new business in one of those countries and continue trading. They sold an awful lot of oil to Apartheid South Africa when most of the world had sanctions against it.
To say the industry was corrupt is a biblical understatement. When you hear of the Russian Shadow Fleet, you are speaking with people who know nothing. In all of the previous major sanctions against Russia it was the commodity traders who paid tankers to fill up with Russian oil then turn their transponders off. Sanctions against Russia were highly profitable. Traders could buy oil at fire sale prices then ship it to countries of questionable financial standing who may or may not themselves be under sanctions.
Today’s Russian Shadow Fleet
This book makes a good case for today’s Russian Shadow fleet being operated at least in large part by Zhuhai Zhenrong, a Chinese trader. It doesn’t accuse them. I mean the book was published in 2021 with the paperback coming out in 2022. When it gets to A Lot of Skeletons at the end of the book it talks about BNP Paribas and its $9 billion settlement with the U.S. government which also locked it out of the U.S. dollar market (banking system) for some number of years. If you couldn’t pay in U.S. dollars you couldn’t trade.
The relatively new Chinese trading firms don’t have that problem. They have the Chinese central banking system and a government telling them to follow the previously established playbook. You know. Make huge profits evading sanctions like the EU and American commodity traders used to do before the U.S. started fining and locking them out of the U.S. dollar market.
Eilat–Ashkelon Pipeline
A running topic in The World for Sale is the Eilat–Ashkelon Pipeline. I believe it first appears on page 43 of this 330 page book. The CIA flagged it in a briefing to Lyndon B. Johnson. On page 49 you will find the following quote.
Trade through the pipeline was shrouded in secrecy. At the Iranian end of the trade, tankers would load oil from Iran in the Persian Gulf and the crew would tell port authorities that they were heading to ‘Gibraltar, for orders’. But the tankers would never appear in Gibraltar. Instead, they would sail in secret to Eilat, unload their oil, and reappear empty in Iran.
The World for sale
Greed is Good
Despite hating each other, Iran and Israel formed many different shell companies around 1967 to hide the fact they both created the Eilat–Ashkelon Pipeline. The Shah of Iran was even referred to as the landlord. You betcha! Everyone was taking a cut.
Despite claims of “no Iranian oil” flowing through this pipeline, once you read The World for Sale you will understand the right fake paperwork lets anything go through. You will also know just how much of each company was devoted to creating and maintaining such fake paperwork.
What Blockade?
After you read The World for Sale you totally understand how and why the rest of the world is laughing at Incompetence Unlimited.
Yeppers, the dynamic duo that couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the bottom of the heel. These traders had rooms full of blank fake documents to prove the providence of whatever cargo a ship was carrying. One ship’s captain refused to paint a new name on his ship so they paid him money to hang a tarp over the side, hiding the name. Different flags and paperwork later he was sailing a profitable cargo for them.
Note that this Iran map is from 2004 so any new pipelines won’t be on it. Neither are any of the possibly super secret pipelines.
Pay attention to the pipelines going to the Caspian Sea and Turkey.
Let us not forget Syria is now trying to become an oil transportation hub. Once a tanker truck is on that road, as long as it has papers that pass the quick glance inspection, it goes all the way to the port. For a fee of course. Syria is looking up at dead broke. Iraq ain’t much better off. For the right amount of money you can bet Iranian oil also goes down that road. The closer the price of crude gets to $100/barrel the easier it will be to look the other way for a fee. They might even hire trucks out of Iraq so there is nothing tying it to Iran.
Iran Won
I won’t delve into everything from the above link, but Incompetence Unlimited should have read this book. They also should have dug up Ollie North.
Iran is a Democratic Utopia
It’s true. Iran has achieved the Democratic party’s dream of complete gun control. When people protest in the streets they get mowed down by the thousands. The people live in poverty and squalor but the regime funds terrorism around the world using its oil profits. A great many commodity traders helped Iran make that money.
Before you get too bent out of shape, keep in mind that we installed the Shah of Iran. He lived in wealth and splendor while his citizens lived in poverty and squalor. Other than the funding of terrorism, for the Iranian people, little has changed.
Until a first world country colonizes Iran, giving it a new constitution and form of government, keeping it a vassal for at least a century, nothing will change for the Iranians. Everyone you install will be corrupt.
Before you spit on me for saying that, take a good look at the cesspit of India. Despite what people may say about British Colonial Rule there, the trains ran mostly on time, roads got built and fixed, there were schools and jobs. Today India looks like something out of Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome.
Summary
Now that most U.S. and EU commodity traders can be locked out of the U.S. Dollar banking system in a flash leaders of said countries think they have cleaned up commodity trading. Nope. You just made the Chinese yuan an international currency standard. The same playbook of parachuting into shit-holes doing business with some of the most despicable creatures on the planet is being followed. All the profit now flows to China. America, with is $40 trillion national debt doesn’t get to tax any of it.
Until you read The World For Sale you cannot begin to comprehend the scale of profits earned via illegal deals and hidden from all taxes. I didn’t even know bribes were tax deductable!
