, Columnist
Noble Group Fails the Micawber Test
The Hong Kong-based trader can only keep the wolf from the door by getting further into debt or selling more of itself.
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Trading businesses should be pretty simple. You buy something, and then sell it for more than you paid.
Joseph, in the book of Genesis, did some exemplary commodities trading by buying grain cheap in a glut, and warehousing it until famine pushed prices higher. Wilkins Micawber, in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, applied the same principle to domestic economy: