CIVETS to replace N11 to replace BRIC: it's a mad, mad mad men world!

FT "big picture" piece that explores the great Wall Street competition to package the next darling of global investment. The BRIC concept succeeded the more generalized buzz phrase "emerging markets"--itself a brilliant bit of packaging for the post-1987 crash investment audience (no one wants to invest in developing economies, the logic went, but emerging sounds so much better!).

Goldman Sachs' creation of the BRIC notion just concentrated the idea, a somewhat lumpy lumping of the four best investment opportunities of the time.  Naturally, the BRICs have outperformed any other confection since that time--as cherry-picked collections are wont to do.

Then came the Next 11 (another Jim O'Neill creation), a complete hodgepodge that fell, in theory, in emerging markets 5 through 15--a "collection of mini-Indias" one hawker claims.  The sale is simple:  this is the next ground floor of globalization, offering early-entry investment opportunities no longer found in the BRICs.

Alas, just like Malcolm Gladwell's success with "Tipping Point" and "Blink" triggered a whole crop of copycat volumes, all sporting the same white cover with the would-be iconic image dead center ("Look, a one-word book!  I should be able to maintain my attention through that!"), these quaint packages spawn their own competitors, the funkiest of the new crop being the CIVETS!  This comes from HSBC, which is naturally drawn to awkward acronyms.

[I myself have long favored the TPMB, for Turkey, Poland, Malaysia and Brazil.]

CIVETS stands for Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa--a crew that just naturally gloms together. Allegedly, the bond is their expensive type of coffees produced. But that may just be a running joke.

We can laugh at such packaging, but compared to the GWOT or the Axis of Evil or Axis of Diesel, these notions all actually capture a lot more of globalization's ongoing reality than those dreamed up by Pentagon planners.