Ruchir Sharma is an investor, author, fund manager and columnist for the Financial Times. He is the head of Rockefeller Capital Management's international business, and was an emerging markets investor at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Career
Sharma has told interviewers he spent his early school years in Mumbai, Delhi, and Singapore. He did his undergraduate studies at the Shri Ram College of Commerce in New Delhi, and afterward joined a securities trading company, and in 1991 he launched a column called For Ex, first for The Observer, later for The Economic Times of India. His writings attracted the attention of Morgan Stanley, which hired him in its Mumbai office in 1996. In 2002 he moved to the New York office, which remains his base today. In 2003 he became co-head of the emerging markets team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. In 2006 he became head of the team. In 2016, he took on an added role as Chief Global Strategist of MSIM. In November 2021, it was announced he would leave the firm on January 31, 2022.
Economic and Financial Market Views
Sharma's first book, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the next Economic Miracles (Norton 2012) chronicled his travels through emerging countries trying to spot the next big economic winners—and losers. He defined "breakout nations" as those poised to grow faster than rivals in their own income class. The book broke the nonfiction sales record in India and became an international bestseller.
In 2012 Foreign Policy magazine cited Sharma as one of its top 100 Global Thinkers "for dusting the gold off the term 'emerging markets', and refocusing the global discussion on "the real breakout nations to watch."
Sharma used his travels as the basis for many of his opinion columns, first published in The Economic Times, later in Newsweek International, The Wall Street Journal and other global media. Sharma's work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Time, Foreign Policy, Forbes, and The Bloomberg View, among others. A 2017 profile in the Financial Times described Sharma's style as a mix of stories picked up through his wanderings in bazaars and political rallies with "simple rubrics to explain distant economies… think Anthony Bourdain's inquisitiveness combined with Warren Buffett's folksiness."
From 2016 to early 2021 Sharma was a contributing opinion writer on global economics and politics for the New York Times, and he is currently a contributing editor at the Financial Times.
In June 2016, W. W. Norton & Company released The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World. It explained the key principles and rules he uses to identify nations that are poised to rise or decline in coming years, starting with the principle of impermanence. Rapid economic growth is difficult to achieve, much less sustain. Analysts typically make forecasts in a straight line, assuming current booms and busts will continue, when the opposite is more often true. Hot economies rarely stay hot, and cold economies rarely stay cold, indefinitely. Economies move in cycles, not straight lines [Rise and Fall p 7-11]. Thus the next stars of the global economy are often found in the shadows, outside the glare of media and analyst hype. "I prefer to look closely at countries that are so disdained by media that they are virtually ignored," he has said. [Barron's "Ruchir Sharma: Wall Street’s New Global Thinker" July 30, 2016].
In a 2012 piece for Foreign Affairs, "Broken BRICs," Sharma had argued that the broad boom that lifted up virtually all emerging economies in the 2000s was freakishly unusual, and unlikely to be repeated. The hype over the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India and China—was unlikely to be borne out. Forecasters who saw these rapidly catching up with rich ones would be disappointing. Instead, he said, the more likely outcome was a return to the normal historical pattern, with a few emerging economies catching up rapidly, and many struggling. Failing to sustain growth has been the general rule, and that rule is likely to reassert itself in the coming decade (2020's)," he wrote. ["Broken BRICS: Why the Rest Stopped Rising" Foreign Affairs Nov/Dec 2012].