The World for Sale

Trailblazing commodity traders crossed boundaries – including the Iron Curtain.

Despite their increasing economic and political importance in recent decades, the world’s most basic traded resources – known as commodities – remain under the control of just a few people and companies. Whereas investment bankers deal with purely financial issues, like price shifts and market moves, commodity traders wheel and deal in physical goods like oil, grains and metals. Commodity traders control the movement of these resources around the world, and they have acquired a reputation for incredible personal daring.

As a German soldier on the Eastern front in World War II, Theodore Weisser was once held in the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war. When he returned to the Soviet Union in 1954, however, he was going there to buy oil. He managed to negotiate a shipment of oil with the head of the Soviet agency in charge of fossil fuels. On his return to West Germany, people in the oil industry shunned him for working with the Soviets. But he had developed a relationship on the other side of the Iron Curtain...