Hidden Empire of Finance How Wall Street Profits from Our Cities and Fuels Global Inequality

"In Hidden Empire of Finance, Michael Goldman traces the rise of Twenty-First-century new global cities and their fate in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, as well as the roots of this rise dating back to the 1970s. As Dubai, India, China, and other nations sought to build new infrastructure and luxuries to develop cities that would compete with the likes of New York, Paris and London, large-scale flows of capital came in to speculate on the growing real estate market. This intrusion of global finance capital into the productive sectors of national economies represented a web of opaque financial products (such as collateralized debt obligations and real estate investment trusts) that became vehicles for financial speculators to invest in as an alternative to stocks and bonds. As a result, more and more public goods, services and infrastructure are now owned and controlled by major financial firms, which may be located halfway across the globe. Vital services such as water and sewage are beholden to the financial logic of foreign debt. Goldman shows that speculative urbanism relies on dispossession to fuel finance's drive toward accumulation of capital and racialization of institutional practices as elite global capital firms work with localized upper-caste networks to influence the ways cities and ecosystems are governed"–