Swedish crime fiction has, deviating from the stereotype, taken the world of popular literature by storm. It has grabbed pole position, pumping red blood and excitement into a largely passé genre associated with vintage works by the likes of Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner.
Its most popular practioner, the late Stieg Larsson, used a thrilling combination of kinky sex, internet era techno-sophistication, captivating characterisation and crackling pace. The result: over 27 million copies sold worldwide by early 2010 and counting. So niche phenomenon this is not! Larsson was the world’s second biggest seller of fiction in 2008 after the tear-jerking offerings of Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American author.
Unfortunately for the reading public, Larsson, a liberal-left leaning journalist, died of a heart attack at fifty. He had completed the first three of his planned 10 book series, and, poignantly, this just months before the first of them was published in 2006.
But not only has Stieg Larsson’s imagination kicked a moribund literary genre into pulsating life but established a new world capital for crime fiction. It only seems strange at first, before the new associations are forged, and the paradigm shift is fully absorbed. And herein, as recognised by the IMF recently when it meekly accorded greater say and voting rights to both China and India, lies the unlikely parallel, with the increasing clout of the BRIC countries.
Like Swedish crime fiction rewriting the definition, the top four emerging markets are historically poised for a re-rating that will go a distance beyond the erstwhile patronising benevolence accorded to it. As investment destinations, the BRIC’s are rapidly changing from being useful for prudent hedging allocations, designed, at best, to bolster the averaged net profits; to the one sustainable bright area in a sea of problematic gloom.
Of course, the sizing disparities remain substantial as yet, and breed reluctance on the part of the richest countries to come to terms with the new reality. For example, China may be bigger already than the other three members of BRIC combined, and hold trillions of dollars in reserves, but it is still only one fifth the size of the US economy.
And the US has indeed turned the corner. Nevertheless, it is the US which realises that it must cede economic and political power to BRIC, each country of which has an economy of at least a trillion dollars in GDP, for the economic stability of the world. Accordingly, it has been making the necessary policy shifts, as in the IMF, the G-20 and so on. The biggest loser in the relative rankings is likely to be the European Union. Their only hope is to increase bilateral and multilateral trade with BRIC and other regional groupings such as ASEAN too.
As yet, the investment budgets have not tilted dramatically, but the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rich man’s club), has begun to acknowledge that stable and worthy returns are likely to be in BRIC and other non-traditional and emerging market growth scenarios boasting of rich natural resources and cheap labour.
In fact, during the global meltdown of 2008, it was the stimulus programmes, growth rates and domestic consumption of the BRIC’s in particular, that helped stave off a demand-supply crisis of unprecedented proportions. After all, BRIC now accounts for 40% of the world’s foreign exchange reserves.
On its own, BRIC is also picking up the pace in bilateral cooperation. Its principals met in June 2009 and again this April. Brazil, Russia, India and China are admittedly an unlikely bloc, because they are neither contiguous nor even all that like-minded politically. China and India may have pumped up bilateral trade to USD 60 billion now, but there are several thorny issues between them.
Nevertheless, when Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined BRIC, his researchers envisaged a gradual passing of the economic baton, partially by 2020, and almost completely by 2050, to a duopoly of India and China. Opinion remains divided, like the tortoise and the hare parable, on which of the two will win the top economy slot eventually.
Russia, diminished from its glory days of the USSR, and Brazil, are both powers underpinned by massive oil resources. They will constitute the next rung of world economies in future. America and the European Union are, of course, expected to retain their memberships in the league of most influential nations.
But even the authors of that original and prescient Goldman Sachs report and its successors since, did not anticipate such acceleration in the pace of the change occasioned by the meltdown of 2008.
BRIC has gone from being considered potentially lucrative but risky investment destinations to becoming the most likely of safe havens. After all, with Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and others waiting in a queue for massive re-flotation funds, the richer elements in the EU, concerned big brother the US, and all the global lending agencies, are having to undergo a sea-change of outlook. They are forced to ask for stringent and measurable belt-tightening, unpopular as such measures will be politically, as qualifiers at every stage of the bail-outs. But such conditions were routinely applied only to the Third World not so long ago.
Compared to the problems of the rich countries, BRIC has manageable challenges ahead. And the voluntary nature of the transition, the altered perception, is the real difference this time. After all, each of the BRIC countries have been stymied in their geopolitical ambitions in the past by the obduracy of the rich nations.
But this time, they are on sure ground because the increase in their power and influence is happening at the instance of the rich nations in a bid to pull themselves out of the mess they’ve created for themselves.
This is not to say the BRIC countries will not compete between themselves for resources and influence globally in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. But they will also cooperate, wherever possible, in order to get a larger lick at the global pie.
(1,051 words)
1st May, 2010, Labour Day
Gautam Mukherjee
Published as Leader on Edit Page of The Pioneer on 19th May 2010 entitled: As US wanes BRIC waxes. Also published online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived there undr Columnists.
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