TRB in the Financial Times Talking BRIC

I just got around to reading and digesting Gillian Tett‘s phenomenal recounting of the BRIC saga from the Financial Times this past Friday.  Tett does a great job getting to the origins of where the research team got its idea to conceptualize the investment theme and then traces its global spread from finance to consumer products, Nigeria to Latin America.

Your boy TRB got a shout out as well for my post last year calling Jim O’Neill‘s BRIC ideas The Market Call of the Past Decade…

From FT:

“We estimate that two billion people could join the global middle-class by 2030, mainly from Brics,” Goldman’s latest research note trills. The argument is beloved by some investors. “Had you heeded O’Neill’s work and gotten invested in the stock markets of those four nations [back in 2001], you’d have made more money this past decade than by doing virtually anything else conceivable,” declared Joshua Brown, an influential investment commentator, on his Wall Street blog last month. (O’Neill brushes off the praise as “somewhat embarrassing”.)

Don’t be so modest, Jim.  You made a lot of people a lot of money and as Tett notes in the article, your predictions of BRIC overtaking the West economically now look even more right post-crisis, not less.  How many other investment themes can we say that about these days?

Also, FT is about to do a 5 part series on BRIC and its consumers.  I’m there.

Source:

The story of the Brics (FT)