In 2001, a British economist who was at the time, the chairman of asset management at Goldman Sachs, Jim O'Neill, coined the acronym BRIC,

to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, four countries he considered to be at approximately equal spots in terms of their economic development.

They were all newly advanced, as we typically measure such things,

and thus because of their size and potential for growth, they were also worth watching,

as they could someday usurp the top-placed positions of contemporarily far wealthier, far more

advanced, again, as we tend to economically measure such things, nations like the US, UK, Japan, Australia, and so on.

Eight years later, in 2009, the leaders of this, until this point, purely theoretical group, held a brick summit,

formalizing what until then had been a useful term, but not an actual thing. And from that point forward,

they became a real-deal block of nations that aimed, in their words, to challenge the existing

world order, which in many ways is run by those aforementioned wealthier nations. They wanted to

create a multipolar system that would have more than one central geopolitical aggregation of influence and leverage.

These four nations under themselves represented about 40% of the world's population and 15% of the world's GDP.

And they aimed, among other things, to work together as a cooperating blockc within other organizations like the G20 and

United Nations to begin that reorientation toward multipolarity. They were also keen to

help wean the world off the USD, the US dollar, which has long been since World War II,

central to global trade. Most countries using it for all kinds

of exchanges between themselves, even if the US is not involved. This was a key demand

made by the Russian government when it entered the block, which has been especially keen

to do less business in USDs for pretty much ever. Several other countries, including those that make up most of Central Asia and the Middle

East, were granted observer status in this new organization.

And in late 2010, South Africa was formally accepted into the core group, and Brick became Bricks,

which was also an acronym coined by O'Neill nearly a decade earlier, though in his

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