ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical-social context in which post-crisis cross-border financial policy choices were made, in order to situate and contextualise the political agency of Brazilian and South African state managers. It provides a brief account of the unfolding of the global financial crisis in both countries, the main issues associated with financial capital flows between 2008 and 2014, and the evolution of the balance of forces between state, capital, and labour during the period studied. The chapter shows that the post-crisis capital flow boom catalysed financialisation processes and led to uneven configurations of financial vulnerability, which presented policy-makers with differentiated challenges for cross-border finance management, notably due to different structures of portfolio assets and liabilities and to the different institutional structures of currency markets. The ways in which state managers came to grapple with these new forms of vulnerability and assessed their political importance is absolutely central to understanding the nature of post-crisis policy choices in terms of cross-border finance management.
