Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World Hardcover – February 1, 2022 by Rupert Russell

Description

Author: Russell Rupert

Color: Red

Package Dimensions: 20x235x558

Number Of Pages: 288

Release Date: 01-02-2022

Details: Product Description

A fascinating, groundbreaking exposé of how commodity traders in New York and London have destabilized societies all over the world, leaving the most vulnerable at the mercy of hunger, chaos, and war.

For Rupert Russell, the Brexit vote was only the latest shock in a decade full of them: the unstoppable war in Syria, huge migrant flows into Europe, beheadings in Iraq, children placed in cages on the U.S. border. In
Price Wars, he sets out on a worldwide journey to investigate what caused the wave of chaos that consumed the world in the 2010s.

Russell travels to Tunisia, Iraq, Venezuela, Ukraine, East Africa, and Central America and discovers that unrest in all these places was triggered by dramatic and mysterious swings in the price of essential commodities. Deregulation of the commodities markets means that food prices can shoot up even in years of abundant harvests, causing hunger and protest. Oil prices and real-estate values can surge even when supplies are normal, enriching and emboldening dictators. It is this instability–fueled by banks and hedge funds in faraway New York and London–that has toppled regimes and unsettled the West.

Price Wars is a fascinating, original, and groundbreaking exposé of the power of the commodities markets to disrupt the world.

Review

”
Price Wars is a totally original and stimulating read, part war zone reportage, part economic history, and buzzing with ideas about the way markets work that will change your understanding of the world we live in.”

–Liaquat Ahamed, author
of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“An illuminating, sobering and endlessly fascinating look at the root causes and hidden connections between financial markets and some of the developing world’s most wrenching crises. Fearlessly reported from conflict zones from separatist Ukrainian provinces to the Middle East, Russell compelling draws a line between commodity manipulation on Wall Street and the chaos that fuels extremism and violence.”

–Joby Warrick, author of Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“In
Price Wars, Rupert Russell searches for chaos and finds the butterfly effect of volatile prices operating everywhere. His stories are vivid and his analysis airtight. In his hands, price becomes quantum: we can know its present value or trend, but not both. Is our civilization slowly boiling, or can we simplify our hyper-complexity and tame the chaos we have unleashed through integrated financial markets? This fine book provides compelling answers.”

— Dr. Parag Khanna, author of Connectography and Move

“Combining investigative courage with forensic analysis,
Price Wars is a geopolitical masterpiece bursting with bite, originality and compassion.”

–David Lammy, MP, author of Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break Society

About the Author

RUPERT RUSSELL has a Double-Starred First in the Social and Political Sciences from Jesus College, Cambridge, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He has published in the
The Independent,
Huffington Post,
Salon,
Paper,
Dazed, and the
Annual Review of Sociology, and has written and directed two award-winning documentary films.
Price Wars is his first book.