In the 1980s, Satyajit Das worked for a finance company that owned a large stake in an airline. But in the long run, Das says on today’s show, this was part of a much larger shift in the global economy — and that shift turned out to be a disaster. Das got the airline to start making speculative bets on the price of oil. That decision was good for the bottom line: One year, the company made more money from trading than it did from selling tickets on its planes.

  4:03 pm  |   October 4 2011