Interesting profile of Ruchir Sharma in the FT this past week. He is the is Head of Emerging Markets as well as Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Sharma grew up in India and got his start writing a weekly column for The Observer and, later, the Economic Times of India. In 1996, he was recruited by Morgan Stanley in India to join their Asian investing team and has been with the firm since then (although he re-based to New York in 2002).

In addition to his day job as an investor at Morgan Stanley, he is also a published author. His most recent work, The Rise and Fall of Nations, examines the forces of change in a post-crisis world. In the book, he attributes the slowing recovery from the financial crisis to what he calls the “Four Ds”: depopulation, de-democratisation, de-globalisation and de-leveraging. He also outlines 10 “rules of thumb” to predict a country’s future prospects – you can read about them in more detail here.