Hidden Empire of Finance follows the rise of new global cities, tracing their roots back to the 1970s global 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 to speculate on the growing real estate market. A web of opaque financial products, such as collateralized debt and real estate investment trusts, became alternative vehicles for the speculators’ 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.
