BRICS 4th Annual Summit (2012)

The four BRIC countries met in Yekaterinburg for their first official summit 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 means of improving the global economic situation and reforming financial institutions, and discussed how the four countries could better co-operate in the future. There was furthermore discussion on ways that developing countries, such as the BRIC members, could become more involved in global affairs.

In the aftermath of the Yekaterinburg summit, the BRIC nations announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be ‘diversified, stable and predictable’. Although the statement that was released did not directly criticize the perceived ‘dominance’ of the US dollar – something which Russia had attacked in the past – it did spark a fall in the value of the dollar against other major currencies.