On the terrorism of money and national policy-making in emerging capitalist economies

Marx's critique of political economy in economic geography

“…As a whole, then, racialist/neo-colonial and hypermasculinized imaginaries influence the production of alienated and objectified financial knowledges about emerging markets as investment destinations, resulting in their representation as a cluster of asset classes with relatively high risk/reward ratios (Sidaway & Pryke 2000;Lee 2011;Bassens 2012). Needless to say, this particularly 'perverted' representation of the capitalist reality of emerging markets -in that it involves oppressive relations of race, gender and sexuality -has profound material implications in terms of highly volatile and pro-cyclical patterns of financial capital flows to those countries, powerfully shaping the existence of the people living there (Alami 2018b). The concept of fetishism allows unpacking this process, and repoliticising financial categories such as emerging market risk.…”

Spatial fixes and switching crises in the times of COVID-19: implications for commodity-producing economies in Latin America

“…To maintain a favourable destination for foreign capital flows, Latin America's commodity producers had to accept the demands of transnational capital and offer high interest rates. As argued by Alami (2018) this reflects an unevenness of the way in which money power of capital unfolds across the global economy and cements the subordinate positionality of Global South economies in international financial markets. These "relational geographies of money-power" (Alami 2018) manifest themselves in Global South economies having greater cost of national currency credit, a larger vulnerability to exchange rate fluctuations, a pressure to constantly overvalue domestic currencies to manage U.S. dollar-denominated debt, and a larger burden to maintain their international reserves inactive, which has impeded a deepening of domestic financial markets.…”

Taming Foreign Exchange Derivatives Markets? Speculative Finance and Class Relations in Brazil

“…The objective of the IOF on FX derivatives was neither to alter Brazil's form of external financial integration, nor to achieve some degree of isolation from the vagaries of international finance. In other words, it did not aim at challenging the subordinate positionality of Brazil in the global financial and monetary system and associated patterns of subordinate financialization (Alami, , ; Kaltenbrunner and Painceira, ). Rather, by reducing gains on ‘excessive’ speculative carry trade operations, it explicitly aimed at mitigating some of their worst short‐term consequences.…”

“…Those markets are characterized by local institutional specificities but are also crucially shaped by international dimensions (including global patterns of financial flows to Brazil, the growing presence of non‐resident investors, the operations of local banks with international economic agents, the position of the Brazilian currency, the real, in the global monetary system, and the place of São Paulo in the global financial system). Accordingly, I argue that the Brazilian IOF on FX derivatives is a form of state power that internalizes the subordinate positionality of Brazil in the global financial and monetary system and associated patterns of subordinate financialization (Alami, , ; Kaltenbrunner and Painceira, ). As the article demonstrates, this has implications in terms of how financialization processes tend to reproduce global core–periphery relations (Wade, ).…”