Hidden Empire of Finance follows the rise of new global cities, tracing their roots back to the 1970s proliferation of neoliberalism and following their fate in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. As India, China, and other nations sought to develop urban infrastructures that could compete with western hubs like New York, Paris, and London, large-scale flows of capital intruded into national economies as speculative investment in the growing real estate market. A web of opaque financial products, such as collateralized debt and real estate investment trusts, became alternative vehicles for these investments, resulting in vast networks of public goods and services that are now owned and controlled by major financial firms located oceans away. Michael Goldman shows that speculative urbanism relies on dispossession and the racialization of institutional practices to fuel finance's insatiable appetite for capital, determining the ways cities across the global South and North are governed.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. Through the Looking Glass of Global-City Making
- Part I: Preface to Part I
- Chapter 1. The Making of the Global Urban Turn: Transnational Policy Networks Redefine the City
- Chapter 2. The Gathering Storm: Urban Transformation Across Three Continents
- Chapter 3. “The Bubbleon a Whirlpool of Speculation”: Afterlives of the Financial Crisisand the New Urban Imaginary
- Part II: Preface to Part II
- Chapter 4. “A Picture of the Future”: Urbanization and the Challenges to Democracy in Bengaluru
- Chapter 5. The Making of an Urban Land Market: Dispossession, Financialization, and the Emergence of Bengaluru as a Global City
- Chapter 6. Remaking Real Estate, Capital Markets, and City Life: Private Equity and the New Logics of Finance
- Conclusion. The Turn to a Postspeculative Future
- Notes
- References
- Index
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