Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 115 - Systems
Welcome to Issue 115 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
I’m back in Dubai after my time in Spain, returning to our usual Friday Five format. This week, we explore our belief in systems—especially the financial kind. Two works hold our attention: The World for Sale, an exposé of the shadowy world of commodity traders; and The Big Short, Adam McKay’s clever, kinetic, Oscar-winning film about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Both ask hard questions about why we keep faith in less-than-perfect systems—perhaps because the alternative feels worse.
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
The World For Sale. By Javier Blas & Jack Farchy.
Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. Titans of industry. Disruptors, innovators. Household names. But what about Marc Rich, Theodor Weisser, or Ivan Glasenberg? Most people have never heard of them. Yet, these men controlled the flow of the world’s raw materials—oil, metal, grain. The things nations go to war over. They didn’t invent or inspire. They traded. Quietly, anonymously. And ruthlessly.
Most of us take for granted the ease with which we fill up our cars, buy a new smartphone, or order a cup of our favourite branded coffee. But behind nearly every act of consumption is a frenetic international trade in natural resources. And underpinning that trade are the commodity traders. Vast power and influence concentrated in just a few hands. Little noticed and little scrutinised. Until now.
The World For Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources tells the story of the men behind the curtain—those pulling the strings of global trade for the last 75 years. And it is almost entirely men: fewer than one in twenty senior executives in the industry are women.
Written by financial journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, the book often reads like a geopolitical thriller. We are dropped into sanctioned states and warzones—Iraq, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Angola—where deals are cut in backchannels and cash. Traders as pioneers, willing to tread where others can’t. Or won’t.
These traders reconfigured the world economy—discreetly, and with astonishing reach. They made fortunes, sidestepped embargoes, and bent geopolitics to fit their needs. Men like Marc Rich, born in Belgium in 1934, the ‘Godfather of Oil,’ who once diverted a tanker of Venezuelan crude oil to rescue Jamaica from an energy crisis—at a price that deepened the country’s dependence on him. And he did it all from a single phone call at his house in Switzerland in the middle of the night. As powerful as a president.
The book is full of such figures. Many with the same traits: charming, manically hard-working, fiercely intelligent. Singularly focused on making money. Risk over safety. Profit over principle.
Blas and Farchy identify four key turning points that reshaped the world of commodity trading after the Second World War:
The liberalisation of previously state-controlled markets, especially oil, in the 1970s.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which redrew the global and political economic map.
China’s explosive industrial growth in the early 2000s, driving unprecedented demand.
The financialisation of global trade, beginning in the 1980s, as banks and hedge funds piled into commodities.
These four shifts saw a spectacular expansion in the wealth and power of the handful of companies and individuals who dominated the global trade in commodities. By 2019, the four largest trading firms, including Glencore (metals), Cargill (grains), and Trafigura (oil)—turned over $725 billion. More than the total exports of Japan.
Yet the authors lay out the cost: a pattern of corruption cases, regulatory blind spots, low public tax contributions, and indifference to climate consequences. Not all are guilty—but many are far from clean.
At its core, commodity trading is simple: buy raw materials in one place, sell them in another, and profit from the difference. The role exists because the supply and demand of commodities rarely align. Timing is everything.
It’s a system. But we don’t know who pulls the levers, how prices are set, or who profits.
We just believe. We put our faith in the system.
Because the alternative—a world without belief—is worse.
2. What I’m Watching
The Big Short. (2015) Directed by Adam McKay.
“I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They’ll be blaming immigrants and poor people.” — Mark Baum, The Big Short.
There’s a scene in The Big Short where the character of Ben Rickert, a trader with a conscience, tells his two protégées to stop celebrating.
They’re in Las Vegas and have just ‘shorted’ the American housing market—effectively betting against the American economy itself. They’re about to make millions and are high fiving like they’ve won the lottery. But Rickert, played by Brad Pitt, stops them dead, angrily telling them:
“If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number—every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that?”
I first saw The Big Short when it premiered at the Dubai Film Festival in 2015. Based on the book by Michael Lewis, the film follows three groups of investors who saw the U.S. mortgage collapse coming in 2008 and bet against it. The system imploded, revealing its flaws, dishonesty, and corruption. A $700bn bailout from the U.S. government followed. But not before a financial tsunami washed over millions of ordinary lives.
The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning Best Adapted Screenplay. Director Adam McKay adapts Lewis’ book with wit, energy, and just enough moral conscience. It’s massively entertaining, not least because of the cast—including Pitt, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale—all playing characters that have an inside track on the imminent collapse. Each playing their hand a little differently. Each with a slightly different conscience.
Carell’s character, Mark Baum, is closest to the film’s moral centre—furious, damaged, incredulous. Haunted by his brother’s suicide, he’s already volatile. So when he uncovers the scale of the fraud by the banks, he’s ready to cash in—not out of greed, but retribution. Carell’s scenes with Gosling’s cocky, smirking trader Jared Vennett, are some of the film’s best and funniest. They both want in.
There’s an unmistakable sense of outrage behind the whole film. We can’t help but feel it too, because we lived through it. And continue doing so. Banks and mortgages, products and jargon, offers and credit.
McKay tackles the impenetrable language of the topic through humour and sleight of hand. Margot Robbie in a bathtub explains mortgage-backed securities. Anthony Bourdain breaks down CDOs using fish stew. Selena Gomez plays blackjack to walk us through synthetic derivatives. It’s absurd. But it works. Because the financial system is absurd. Intentionally designed to be opaque. Like the magician who is telling you everything and showing you nothing.
We know what’s coming.
The crash comes. Lehman Brothers collapses. Foreclosures skyrocket. Markets plunge. Millions lose jobs and homes. The banks are bailed out. No-one goes to jail.
The guys who saw it coming. They get very rich. Gosling’s character, breaking the fourth wall, reminds us, “Hey, I never said I was the hero of the story.”
The story of 2008 wasn’t just about greed. It was the breaking of a social contract—that homes are safe, bricks and mortar are solid.
But they weren’t.
The system got warped.
And the question now is: has it changed?
3. What I’m Contemplating
Trade is older than money. Older, maybe, than language. We’ve always traded whatever we could lay our hands on—shells, salt, stones. I give you something, you give me something back. Keep this up, and we survive.
We do it as kids, too. One of my most vivid school memories is desperately trading Panini football stickers to complete my 1985 album. I once gave up 300 stickers for Bobby Barnes of West Ham United—the missing man I needed. An early lesson in the supply and demand madness of commodity trading.
In a polarised world, trade might even be the last true religion. Everyone believes.
We no longer agree on facts, ethics, or even reality. But we agree that a hundred-dollar bill is worth one hundred dollars. That a line of numbers on a screen has meaning. That the exchange holds. The shared illusion of value in a system.
The two featured works this week explore that belief in systems—The World For Sale in the shadows, The Big Short in broad daylight. Different ends of the same system. One exposed. One still largely hidden.
In both, the stakes are enormous, affecting the lives of billions. Markets touch everything. Not because they are fair or moral, but because they are deeply human. Markets are more social systems than economic systems. Emotional. They survive not by virtue of justice, but by the endurance of belief.
Even when the system collapses—as it did in 2008—we return to it. Because the alternative is worse. Because somewhere inside, we want to believe the exchange is fair. Even when it often isn’t.
One final thought:
The 1996 film Jerry Maguire is often seen as a redemption story—a man putting people above profit after a moral epiphany. But look closer. The film ends not with spiritual peace, or a new way of doing business, but with a huge contract. A multi-million dollar deal. The victory is still financial.
It’s hard to break out of a system. Even Tom Cruise can’t.
4. A Quote to note
“The system isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do.”
- Anonymous.
5. A Question for you
What do you trade most often—your time, energy, attention—and is the exchange truly fair?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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