2026-03-04
1 小时 6 分钟Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner and we are slipping into your feed with this bonus episode.
It is an update of an episode we made last year about commodity traders and it suddenly feels even more relevant now.
The war in Iran has already scrambled the global oil markets.
In January, after U.S.
forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro,
President Trump immediately moved to take control of the Venezuelan oil economy.
Among the industry leaders he invited to the White House were senior executives from two major commodity traders,
Vital and Trafigura.
And it's not just oil.
American soybeans and rare earth metals have become bargaining chips in the ongoing trade war with China.
And behind just about every headline is a commodity trade.
That's what this episode is about.
We have updated facts and figures when necessary.
As always, thanks for listening.
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 last year,
as the US was signing a mineral deal with Ukraine and Donald Trump was expressing his appetite for the natural resources in Greenland,