Your view is that India has the potential and ability to grow at 6% to 7%, it could be 8% to 9%. We have all the ingredients like you mentioned and we are digital ready with the dynamism of a young population. Why should we fast track to the top three economies in the world?
Jim O’Neill: I mean, to be really candid, if India is not significantly bigger than Germany and Japan by 2030, I personally would be really worried for India. The next bit should be easy. I am going to say, I was thinking whether I should say this or not, India should set itself the challenge of being three times as big as Japan in another 15 years because that is how big the natural advantages are at this point. Japan has dreadful demographics and it still has poor productivity and it is very vulnerable to a world that does less trading goods. It should be really easy for India to become quite a bit bigger. But if India wants to get to be really big and more wealthy for more Indian people, it should want to become a lot bigger and, I do not know, become half the size of the US by 2035 or something.
Fantastic. So, nice to hear that endorsement coming from you, the man who actually saw the potential when he coined the word BRIC. I am going to change gears and talk about the view of the world now. There is a change in regime in the United States. Everyone is saying it is like someone has pressed the reset button again. Do you think Donald Trump will press the reset button again?
Jim O’Neill: Does Donald Trump himself know what he is going to do? Like everybody else, I sit and watch and read these things about everybody who thinks they know what Donald Trump’s going to do. I am not sure Donald Trump knows what he is going to do. I think he enjoys the game of dealing with people. A silly example, when I look back on his famous attempts to become a friend of the North Korean leader, he seemed to have no idea what it was he was going to do when he managed to meet him.
Yesterday I read that he has invited President Xi to his inauguration. That is quite an imaginative thing to do. We have a world of finance and business that is convinced that relations between the US and China are going to get worse. Maybe it would not. I do not know. Intellectually, it makes it fascinating, but I would not want to be overly confident in predicting that Trump’s going to do X, Y, and Z, because I do not think he knows yet. What I would quickly add, I think he has chosen a very experienced person in macroeconomics to be his treasury secretary, and a very important thing that, again, I do not know how it will evolve, is how much Trump is going to trust Scott Bessent, or delegate economic issues to Scott. I was asked by a Washington magazine yesterday, interestingly, to write a piece about what I think of the possibility of a modern version of the so-called Plaza Accord. You can see the conditions for some sort of grand global deal where China agrees to stimulate its consumer, Europe agrees to boost its defence spending, Germany agrees to put more auto plants in the US and the US then decides we do not need these tariffs because they are all going to buy more US things and that would be an incredibly constructive thing for the world economy. One other thing to say, it would probably also be very good for equity markets outside the US.
