Trading

Tuesday

Richard Walker

Is private equity secretly running your life?

Did you know that a secretive thing called private equity owns almost 10 per cent of the UK economy? Did you know that it controls the jobs of several million people and may well own your local hospital, water supply, children’s school or even your home? No? Here is a book that aims to straighten you out on all that. Private equity is one of those things that you either know about or don’t. If you are in the finance business you know, because it is the story of the past quarter century. If you are not in that world, if leveraged buyouts and limited partners and debt pushdowns are all just so much business-page noise, then you are in the majority. And it turns out that means you may not know who is really running your life.

Tuesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Comparing the sentences of Sam Bankman-Fried and Tom Hayes

Compare these two sentences, as tests used to say. First, Sam Bankman-Fried, the thirty-two-year-old American founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, who has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for a fraud that cost customers and investors $11 billion and for which, according to the New York judge, he uttered “never a word of remorse.” The jail term may look long but experts say he could be out in eighteen and at least Bankman-Fried has a prospect of sunshine before he’s old — unlike other US fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi-scheme operator Allan Stanford, whose century-plus sentences ensured they would never be out at all.

bankman-fried

Tuesday

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy

The cash kings of Covid

From our UK edition

March 2020 was a grim moment for most people. The coronavirus pandemic had spread beyond China’s borders and was rampaging through Iran, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. But for Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Glencore’s oil traders, who operate from an office a few steps from Berkeley Square in London’s Mayfair, had recognised the deadly seriousness of the new virus earlier than most. Now, as planes were grounded and office workers told to stay at home, they sprang into action. Because of the lockdowns, oil demand was collapsing at the fastest rate in modern history. Within a few weeks the price of oil would do the unthinkable and briefly drop below zero.