David Gelber
BRIC Lit
Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power
By Michael Reid
Yale University Press 334pp £20 order from our bookshop
In 2001 an economist at Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC to denote the rising powers of the world economy. Brazil, Russia, India and China, it was bullishly forecast, would become the dominant financial forces by 2050. With Brazil and Russia suffering recessions in the last five years and India and China experiencing a slackening in growth, the hypothesis has gone much the same way as the bank’s reputation. Nonetheless, the prognostication has triggered an avalanche of books tapping the zeitgeist in each but one of these countries – Brazil.
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