The inventor of BRICS has a message for ‘lazy, colonial’ Europe—India and China are still not taken seriously enough on the world stage
Source: Fortune ·
Jim O’Neill’s Goldman Sachs Economics Paper No. 66 reshaped how business leaders looked at the world, but it may now be time for a significant upgrade
From the source
Twenty-five years ago, the unassumingly titled Goldman Sachs Economics Paper No: 66 changed the way business leaders looked at the world. Its author was Jim O’Neill, one of the bank’s leading economists who would become head of Goldman’s Asset Management division in 2010, where he oversaw $800 billion of clients’ money. O’Neill and his team of economists and analysts had alighted on a new, emerging market trend—four countries that would play an outsized role in the world economy. Brazil, Russia, India, and China (which accounted for less than 10% of global GDP at the time) would be the new power houses, growing far more rapidly than the mature economies of the West. The BRICs acronym stuck, although O’Neill now jokes that it might have been better to call the group “ICs”, given Russia’s warring tendencies and economic woes and Brazil’s regular bouts of political turmoil. “Economically, 25 years later, BRICS has become utterly dependent on the ‘ICs’,” O’Neill told me. “China and India…