📊 BRICS, Samsung, and IMF

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Today's charts:

1. How will the new BRICS shape up in 2024? 🌎

2. Samsung’s strangehold on Latin American phones ☎️

3. The IMF’s complex position in LatAm 💵

Make sure you check out the comment of the week at the bottom!

World Politics 🌎

Last week, global politics got a pretty big shake-up with the announcement that the BRICS would be more than doubling in size, going from their current 5-member roster to an 11-member club.

The BRICS bloc, currently consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, have had the same roster since South Africa joined in 2010. The grouping spun out of a term coined in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs analyst, the BRIC, reflecting major emerging markets that would dominate the global economy by the year 2050.

Well, after 13 years and 15 summits as a fivesome, the BRICS have decided to welcome some new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The BRICS Overtakes the G7 in Global GDP

Obviously, we’re most excited for Argentina’s accession, which is doubling the amount of Latin American representation in the BRICS. Meanwhile, the remaining new members serve as a pretty large entry into the greater Middle East and Northeast Africa region.

As a result of these new members joining, 2024 will solidify a trend long in the making, which is the now 11-member BRICS surpassing the Group of Seven (G7) in terms of nominal gross domestic product—though technically this has already been the case since 2020, if only by a little bit.

The G7, which originated in the 1970s, is an intergovernmental forum bringing together Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States (as well as the European Union). The roster spans some of the traditionally largest economies in the world, as well as the standard-bearers for Western liberal democracies.

Notably, there was a period of overlap between the two groupings, back when BRICS member Russia was part of what was then called the G8—that ended in 2014 when it was suspended following its annexation of Crimea.

Now, the G7 has long been dominated by its largest economy, the US, and BRICS is looking like it’ll be similar with its own largest economy in China. Geopolitics aside, however, what we’ll be watching is whether blocs like the expanded BRICS can deliver tangible results for its Latin American member countries.

Today Brazil and Argentina; tomorrow, Mexico?

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