Goldman Ball Sachs Declares the End of the BRIC Era

Many years ago, Goldman Ball Sachs coined the acronym BRIC, as a cool and new way to promote wanton investment into the world’s shittiest markets: Brazil (I spell it with a Z, fuckers), Russia, India, and China. They had the media sucking their dicks because of it, with James Cramer touting BRIC almost every night on his clown show, featured on CNBC.

Well, all bad ideas, eventually, die. And so does the BRIC’s of shit. Goldman is merging their BRIC fund with their emerging market fund, effectively shutting it, the fuck, down.

Fourteen years after former Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the acronym that ushered in an unprecedented investment boom, the biggest emerging markets are now sputtering. Russia and Brazil have fallen into recessions. China, long an engine of the world’s growth, is poised for its weakest expansion since 1990.

The downfall of the BRIC fund, which had lost 88 percent of its assets since a 2010 peak, also underscores how the strategy of bundling disparate countries into a single investment theme is losing its appeal among investors.

“The promise of BRIC’s rapid and sustainable growth has been challenged very much for the last five years or so,” said Jorge Mariscal, the chief investment officer of emerging markets at UBS Wealth Management, which oversees about $1 trillion. “The BRIC concept was popular. But nothing is eternal.”

What does it all mean? Well, for one it means the Wall Street marketing apparatus is no longer actively promoting the investment in BRIC, because they’ve lost their dirty fucking shirts in it and have abandoned their BRIC profit centres. Also, it’s an acknowledgement of something almost everyone already knew: the BRIC nations are scandalous bastards, undeserving of hard western currency.

Lastly, it might mean the bottom is in for BRIC, since despondency usually correlates with overly depressed prices. Bear in mind, sometimes prices are down for a reason and cheap prices could always get cheaper.