Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets: Facing the Liquidity Tsunami

This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the messy and crisis-ridden relationship between the operations of capitalist finance, global capital flows, and state power in emerging markets.

The politics, drivers of emergence, and diversity of these myriad forms of state power are explored in light of the positionality of emerging markets within the network of space and power relations that characterises contemporary global finance. The book develops a multi-disciplinary perspective and combines insights from Marxist political economy, post-Keynesian economics, economic geography, and postcolonial and feminist International Political Economy. Alami comprehensively reviews the theories, histories, and geographies of cross-border finance management, and develops a conceptual framework which allows unpacking the complex entanglement of constraint and opportunities, of growing integration and tight discipline, that cross-border finance represents for emerging markets. Extensive fieldwork research provides an in-depth comparative critical interrogation of the policies and regulations deployed in Brazil and South Africa.

This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international political economy, contemporary geographies of money and finance, and critical development studies. It should also prove of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between finance and development in emerging markets and beyond.

Ilias Alami is a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the political economy of money and finance, development and international capital flows, the geographies of global finance and financialisation, state capitalism, and race/class/coloniality. He has published peer-reviewed research articles in Geoforum, New Political Economy, Review of Radical Political Economics, Review of African Political Economy, and Development and Change. Prior to joining Maastricht University, he was a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo and the University of Johannesburg.