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.
