i actually came across a very very intriguing uh... paper while i was doing research for this topic. The book takes place after nineteen fifty primarily because the subject of commodities markets panda gets deeply into his storyography where there are less sources and it's more difficult to get access to precise quantitative figures. In order to write a book going back all that way the eight hundred hundred pages and a lot of it would not have the kind of storytelling that these journalists like to do. It reads like a series of long extended bloomberg articles with lots of anecdotal data but also some drama intrigue.
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The exchange of goods and services has existed since the earliest forms of civilization, from simple barter arrangements at the local town square to Phoenician traders navigating the Mediterranean with goods from Europe and North Africa. Today, however, the scope of exchange is truly massive, with online commerce coming to dominate nearly all segments of retail, and the scale encompassing transoceanic trade routes totaling 11 billion tons in maritime cargoes in 2021. Underpinning all this lies an extremely complex web of producers, shippers, pipelines, warehouses, and commodities traders that include the massive concerns such as Koch Industries in energy and Glencore in metals, with over 100,000 employees each. Billions of dollars have been made and lost in commodities futures, and as volatility continues to disrupt prices of everyday items from gasoline to grain, the trend of ever tighter global trade integration seen since the end of the Cold War may start to unravel as regional blocks choose to have closer and more reliable supply chains.
