Free The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly Page B

University of Southern California, and in 1984 he joined Marc Rich & Co. as a coal trader in his native South Africa. He married, had a daughter and a son, and began learning the nuances of the business, relocating from Africa to Australia and then to Asia, where he oversaw the region’s coal operations during a time of crisis in the industry. He was a quick learner, and in 1990, he was promoted to run the company’s global coal business.
    There were many challenges in the commodity trade, and one was always the need for good credit. During the 1990s, as the price of coal hit a low point in parts of the Pacific region that Glasenberg oversaw, repo men were circling coal-storage facilities, where they would seize the holdings of companies that had defaulted on their debts. Sometimes they walked away with the wrong assets.
    In Australia, where the industry was particularly squeezed and repossessions were a serious threat, Glasenberg ordered employees to put ropes around their coal stockpiles with Marc Rich flags to mark them off. He fretted constantly about all the bad things that could happen to his precious assets. Each time he signed off on a coal shipment, he was tortured during the weeks it took for the cargoes to arrive intact at their destined port.
    In 1991 Glasenberg, his wife, and his two children moved to atown near Zurich, not far from the company’s headquarters in Zug. Shortly after they relocated, Marc Rich summoned Glasenberg for lunch at his house. It was a sign that he had attracted the attention of senior management.
    Rich was by then in the twilight of his career. Heavily involved with real estate investing, he had delegated much of his company’s day-to-day operations to Strothotte, so even senior management had limited dealings with him. Rich was overcompensating by living hard. Over lunch at his house, Glasenberg marveled at the chance to meet the industry’s king. But despite the amicable rapport the two developed, it was clear that Rich would never be a mentor.
    Two years later, after Rich’s zinc trade had gone bust, Glasenberg was part of the new generation that seized control, working closely with Strothotte, who took over after the management buyout. Over the decade that followed, Strothotte trained Glasenberg for a bigger job, and ultimately relinquished the CEO role to him in 2002. They functioned well together. When Glasenberg took over as chief, Strothotte stayed on as chairman.
    As CEO, Glasenberg maintained a breakneck schedule. No matter what the weather, he rose at dawn for swims, cycling, or five-mile runs by the lake near Zug, keeping his body trim and prepared for long flights and all-nighters. His thinning, dark-brown hair was always neatly combed, his square glasses perched expertly on his clean-shaven face.
    His attention to physical detail extended to the office, where his fixation with accounting kept him preoccupied with the company’s balance sheet. Between jetting around to visit Glencore’s far-flung mining, shipping, industrial processing and trading sites and conferring with his business heads over minute details ofthe business, Glasenberg considered how he would navigate the next decade.
    From time to time he would admonish Glencore’s division leaders not to dream too big about mergers and acquisitions. “Guys, you can’t keep bringing big fixed assets because this company can’t do it,” he’d say in one-on-one meetings, referring to the costly investments they would occasionally propose. If the division heads wanted to buy billion-dollar properties, he’d tell them, only an IPO and the permanent cash it would bring with it would make a difference. “You have to go public,” Glasenberg said again and again. “Think about it.”
    Meanwhile, Glencore was stuck with relatively small-ticket items: a few hundred million dollars here, a few hundred million there. The multibillion-dollar purchases that would make Glencore more of a global contender were simply