Price Wars

Critics Review

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

  DAVID LAMMY MP

• If you’re desperately searching for a single reason why Brexit, Trump or the war in Ukraine have caused such chaos, then sociologist and documentarian Rupert Russell might have the answer. [He] is a really engaging guide

  OBSERVER

• Provocative . . . Price Wars arrives at quite an appropriate moment, culturally speaking, with many people emerging from the depths of the pandemic wondering whether what was long billed as a core strength of globalisation, its flexibility, had been revealed through supply-chain shocks and other disruptions to be a bit of a broken promise or even an excuse for market fragility

  NEW YORK TIMES

• 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

• Rupert Russell guilefully searches for chaos and finds the butterfly effect of volatile prices operating everywhere. His stories are vivid and analysis airtight. In his hands, prices become quantum: we can know its present value or trend, but not both. Is our civilisation 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

• Rupert Russell’s adventures into a host of modern apocalypses are retold in this thrilling page-turner. The result is an incredible synthesis that places global finance at the heart of chaos across the world

  POLLY TOYNBEE

• 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 compellingly draws a line between commodity manipulation on Wall Street and the chaos that fuels extremism and violence

  JOBY WARRICK, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of BLACK FLAGS

• A skilfully conducted tour of the role of price, once unmoored from reality, in adding chaos to an already chaotic world. A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way

  KIRKUS

• Wry, objective, scary, funny: let’s hope it’s not all true, but that seems unlikely

  GRIFF RHYS JONES

• Deeply reported and thoroughly accessible, this investigation into the far-reaching consequences of economic speculation deserves a wide readership

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

• Price Wars is a thorough and compelling account of political instability generated by the hyper-financialization of commodities. It could not be more timely

  Zach D. Carter, author of THE PRICE OF PEACE: MONEY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LIFE OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

• One of the most important books of our time

  THE INTERCEPT

• Rupert Russell’s new book shows how the financialization of commodity prices worsens volatility and destabilizes geopolitics. It couldn’t be more timely

  AMERICAN PROSPECT

• Price Wars reveals that hedge fund managers and commodities traders based in the financial hubs of New York and London have manipulated the prices of essentials to maintain their profits . . . Russell argues that this practice has had a butterfly effect in contributing to human suffering and exacerbating social and political unrest in countries around the world

  ATTITUDE MAGAZINE