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.

Michael Goldman is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Imperial Nature and the co-editor of The Social Lives of Land and Chronicles of a Global City, among others.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Through the Looking Glass of Global City Making  1
Part I
Preface to Part I  49
1. The Making of the Global Urban Turn: Transnational Policy Networks Redefine the City  51
2. The Gathering Storm: Urban Transformation Across Three Continents  73
3. “The Bubble on a Whirlpool of Speculation”: Afterlives of the Financial Crisis and the New Urban Imaginary  103
Part II
Preface to Part II  137
4. “A Picture of the Future”: Urbanization and the Challenges to Democracy in Bangalore  139
5. The Making of an Urban Land Market: Dispossession, Financialization, and the Emergence of Bengaluru as a Global City  169
6. Remaking Real Estate, Capital Markets, and City Life: Private Equity and the New Logics of Finance  203
Conclusion. The Turn to a Postspeculative Future  231
Notes  249
References  261
Index