The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders (27 page)

Pierre Andurand, the French commodity-trading wunderkind who successfully predicted both the top and the bottom of the crude-oil market in 2008, only to lose his nerve after a big setback in 2011.

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Glencore founder Marc Rich, whose vision for more efficient crude-oil trading reshaped the entire commodity market in the 1970s and 1980s, during which time he was indicted for racketeering, tax evasion, and trading with the enemy.

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Alex Beard, the mercurial head of Glencore’s oil division who helped navigate the firm through the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. He was rewarded during the company’s 2011 IPO, which valued his personal stake at £1.7 billion.

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Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg, whose interest in commodity trading was piqued after he overheard two men doing an international candle-wax transaction, on the day his company’s shares were listed in Hong Kong. Glencore’s IPO valued it at an impressive $59 billion.

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Jennifer Fan, the math prodigy who was hired as an index trader on Morgan Stanley’s commodity desk at age twenty. Her bet on gasoline prices generated $3 million after Hurricane Katrina clobbered the Gulf of Mexico.

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John Mack, who as chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley worried about aggression and greed on his bank’s commodities team—characteristics that eventually led to trouble. At some point, I’ve got to crush these people, he had thought.

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Gary Gensler, who says he was “blessed” to be the CFTC’s chairman for five years, addressing a throng of reporters after a Washington, D.C., speech in 2010. Gensler was one of the staunchest advocates for regulatory reform after the commodities bubble burst.

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Bart Chilton, the plainspoken CFTC commissioner who argued passionately for limits on speculative commodity trades, looked wary as his colleague Scott O’Malia, who disagreed with his views, spoke at a 2013 agency meeting.

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Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson (left) helped pull the troubled carrier out of bankruptcy and then got the top job. He and Delta president Ed Bastian (right) pushed for smarter commodity hedging, which led to the hiring of trader Jon Ruggles to help manage their $9 billion in fuel costs.

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Once a silver trader on the Comex, Gary Cohn used his market savvy to arrange an aluminum position that earned hundreds of millions—and helped make him a partner at Goldman Sachs. As president and chief operating officer, he kept commodities a focus.

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Jon Corzine, the onetime governor and senator who helped negotiate major deals at Goldman Sachs—including its 1999 IPO—was sued by the CFTC for failing to supervise employees at the futures broker MF Global, where $1.2 billion in customer money went missing.

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A former white-collar defense litigator, David Meister raised the CFTC’s enforcement unit out of obscurity, bringing a rash of manipulation cases against industry players that resulted in a series of nine-figure fines. His investigative targets included JPMorgan, UBS, MF Global, Jon Corzine, and Jon Ruggles.

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