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Emerging markets have been promoted by financiers since the late 1980s. The idea was correct: these economies have delivered over three quarters of global growth. Yet the long years of hopeful fanfare, false dawns and woeful returns have proven that bankrolling the end of history was easier said than done. For some, stunning financial coups; for many, catastrophic losses; for all, an odyssey from which none would return unaltered. Frontier is the epic account of fortunes and friendships made and destroyed at the turbulent event horizon of capitalism, as the smart Western money ventured beyond the crumbling Berlin Wall. But three decades on, mystified by our clinical, disconnected ways, the countries of the East and global South are turning elsewhere for the capital they desperately need. Amidst the roiling drama of the emerging markets lies the answer to the one question few going eastward ever thought to ask: who really are the extraordinary peoples building new countries at thefrontier of capitalism – and what do they want.
Emerging markets have been promoted by financiers since the late 1980s. The idea was correct: these economies have delivered over three quarters of global growth. Yet the long years of hopeful fanfare, false dawns and woeful returns have proven that bankrolling the end of history was easier said than done. For some, stunning financial coups; for many, catastrophic losses; for all, an odyssey from which none would return unaltered. Frontier is the epic account of fortunes and friendships made and destroyed at the turbulent event horizon of capitalism, as the smart Western money ventured beyond the crumbling Berlin Wall. But three decades on, mystified by our clinical, disconnected ways, the countries of the East and global South are turning elsewhere for the capital they desperately need. Amidst the roiling drama of the emerging markets lies the answer to the one question few going eastward ever thought to ask: who really are the extraordinary peoples building new countries at thefrontier of capitalism – and what do they want.