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

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.

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.