section_path: History/Founding
section_name: Founding
paragraph_text: Founding
  
  Collective action in the political arena in the late 1990s was present before the economic rationale of BRICS. The idea of a multipolar group like BRICS can be traced back to Yevgeny Primakov during his term as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia. He reiterated the idea in New Delhi in 1998. The forums RIC (Russia, India, China) and IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) predated and played an important role in the creation of BRIC and subsequently BRICS.
  
  The term BRIC, as compared to the alternate term CRIB, was originally developed in the context of foreign investment strategies. It was introduced in the 2001 publication, Building Better Global Economic BRICs by Jim O'Neill, then head of global economics research at Goldman Sachs and later Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. O'Neill now regards the BRICS group as a failed project. In a 2021 article for Project Syndicate he wrote that the BRICS countries "have so far proven incapable of uniting as a meaningful global force" and felt in 2024 that "each year also brings further confirmation that the grouping serves no real purpose beyond generating symbolic gestures and lofty rhetoric".
  
  The foreign ministers of the initial four BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) met in New York City in September 2006 at the margins of the General Debate of the UN Assembly, beginning a series of high-level meetings. A full-scale diplomatic meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on 16 June 2009.
  
  The BRIC group's first formal summit, also held in Yekaterinburg, commenced on 16 June 2009, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev, Manmohan Singh, and Hu Jintao, the respective leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, all attending. The summit's focus was on improving the global economic situation and reforming financial institutions amid the Great Recession. There was also discussion of how the four countries could better cooperate in the future, and ways developing countries, such as three-fourth of the BRIC members, could become more involved in global affairs.
  
  In the aftermath of the 2009 Yekaterinburg summit, the BRIC nations announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be "diverse, stable and predictable". Although their statement did not directly criticize the perceived dominance of the US dollar (as Russia had in the past) it did spark a fall in the value of the dollar against other major currencies.