"He walked in my office and told me, 'I have finally got the commodities market figured out,' " Holladay recalled.
A Glencore spokesperson said: "Regardless of the business environment, Glencore is helping fulfil global demand by getting the commodities that are needed to the places that need them most".
However, the news is even worse for the people at the bottom of its sprawling operations, those who do the difficult, dirty and dangerous job of getting the commodities it trades out of the ground, often in places where the prospects of alternative employment are limited.
It too takes a cradle-to-grave approach: the firm's oil business, for instance, includes everything from exploration to petrol stations.Such integration may improve trading margins, but only by getting the commodities firms into lots of low-margin, capital-intensive businesses like shipping and mining.
Mr. Naimi, the Saudi minister, affirmed his goal of getting the commodity price of oil down to $25 a barrel, but he generated few believers that anyone in OPEC wanted lower prices.
They did not get the boost from lower commodity prices they might have expected to get at that stage of the cycle.
Unless you are seriously considering offering Fed support to Apple or U.P.S. or Wal-Mart or all commodity traders, get the banks out of the nonfinancial sector.
He goes to Fry's to get the latest consumer electronics, orders commodity products like camera batteries from Amazon, and recently bought a tablet from Costco after realizing it had a lower price than Best Buy.
Not only will Facebook get the cost savings of going commodity, but they also get a 3X improvement in storage capacity.
Some observers think that Apple will never get into the commodity TV business because the margins are too low.
