Introduction: Structural Vulnerabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Without a doubt, capitalism has mainly in the Western world improved standards of living, while it has also increased inequalities across the globe. In its attempt to identify and address inequalities, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) publishes reports such as the Latin American Economic Outlook 2019. According to the report, socioeconomic issues in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) can be tackled by a better integration of LAC economies into global markets. This, or at least this is the rationale, would reduce local inequalities and improve standards of living. To do so, the OECD suggests nothing less than a financial deregulation of those LAC economies which are more resource and manufacturing intensive. However, the attempt to integrate LAC economies more into global financial markets can also be seen as an example of ongoing Eurocentric or US-centric modernization, as a Western recipe for economically less advanced countries to ‘catch up’ with the rest of the world. All too often, though, this is in essence not about equal integration into world markets but about maintaining and reproducing existing economic power relations and inequalities in postcolonial fashion on a global scale, something from which mainly Western economies benefit.

A brief look at LAC reveals that the OECD's call for economic rethinking in order to address inequalities (2019: 24) itself needs to be rethought. Rather than explaining problems in less developed economies as local issues, they need to be rethought as local articulations of global inequalities resulting from a US-dominated global financial market. The goal of this chapter is therefore to show how, in particular, private equity (PE) firms operate in the United States. These firms would benefit most from a financial deregulation of less developed economies around the world. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the US economy is referred to as highly financialized while LAC economies are relegated to the position of manufacturing backyards of the United States and other advanced economies (see, e.g., Marin 2018b).

According to the OECD, LAC ‘has seen remarkable socio-economic progress’, while ‘large structural vulnerabilities remain’ (OECD et al. 2019: 3). In particular, in the context of tightening financial markets and rising tensions between the US and Chinese economies, the region faces ‘increasingly complex multi-dimensional challenges’ (ibid.: 3).