Matthieu Favas

speaker

190 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Matthieu Favas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Roaring trades: oil majors’ secret success story · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

So if you take the profit that they make and you divide by the number of people that they employ, it's a really high profit per head.

You know, in a good year, maybe like ten million dollars.

It only works at scale.

So the Americans have tried before, the American majors.

And it didn't work because they did it half-heartedly.

They didn't give enough money, basically, to their traders.

So that limited the scale of the bets.

And also, they did not give them enough independence.

They were forced to sell the barrels of the company, basically.

But they're much more serious about it now.

They're much more determined to do it.

And so you're starting to see that in the way you speak about it.

And also the national oil companies, which are the big state-owned oil producers, which are in the big oil producing countries.

So in the Gulf, for example, Saudi Aramco or Adnok, which is the Abu Dhabi national oil company.

They also want to do it.

So I spoke to one recruiter for this piece and he said that the Americans and the national oil companies, Exxon in particular and Adnok, are among the biggest recruiters at the moment of traders worldwide.

So they're really quite keen to do it.

To do it properly this time, with the right number of people, the right number of dollars to spend.

That's right.

But even if they do that, to your first point, closing the gap may still take quite a few years because it really is quite a finely tuned machine, a well-oiled race car that you need to put together to make it work.

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