The Metabolism of Global Exchange : Finance Capitalism and the Temporality of Speculation

In this paper, I connect a temporality of finance capitalism to the urban frontier of the global economy, both in the first and third worlds. As the "metabolism of global exchange" (Harvey 1985) advances and recedes, consuming and excreting diverse worlds, I focus on the relation between financial capital and the built environment that is transformed through new regimes of discursive/economic intelligibility. First, I closely examine economistic discourses that have surrounded financial panics or crashes in international markets over the past two decades, since the crystallization of a "new complexity" in financial models, speculative calculations, and investment behavior (Lewis 2008). I bring this genealogy up to our current and latest "financial crisis," and study its impact in the "liberalized" real estate markets of contemporary New Delhi, India. What is revealed is a contingent relation between the financial, or speculative economy, and the so-called "real" economy. This temporal relation is mediated through the virtualization of space, on both urban and rural terrains