Morgan Stanley Veteran Ruchir Sharma Named Managing Director and Chairman of Rockefeller Capital Management
- The global investor and writer will form an investment company, Breakout Capital, in partnership with the financial advisory firm.
Global investment advisor and writer, Ruchir Sharma has been named managing director and chairman of financial advisory firm Rockefeller Capital Management. The 47-year-old Indian American will form an investment company, Breakout Capital, in partnership with Rockefeller, the company announced on Feb. 10. He will report to Gregory Fleming, the chief executive, and will join the firm’s management committee.
Sharma spent the past 25 years in Morgan Stanley’s investment-management division, most recently serving as the chief global strategist and head of emerging markets. “Sharma’s longer-term view that U.S.-based investments, like stocks and the dollar, have become overvalued after outperforming much of the rest of the world in recent years,” said The New York Times.
Sharma has been a writer for longer than he has been an investor. He began writing for The Economics Times at age 17. His commentary has since appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Bloomberg and The Guardian, among others, according to his website. He has been a contributing opinion writer at Newsweek International and the New York Times and is currently a contributing editor at the Financial Times. He is also a frequent guest on Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN.
Sharma is an author as well. His most recent, “The 10 Rules of Successful Nations,” was published by Norton in 2020. It is an updated and abridged adaptation of “The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World,” which was released in 2016 and instantly became a New York Times bestseller. In 2012, his first book, “Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles,” debuted as the number one bestseller in India, and earned Sharma the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for 2012. “Breakout Nations” also made the Wall Street Journal hardcover business bestseller list, and was chosen by Foreign Policy as one of its “21 Books to Read in 2012.”
Bloomberg named Sharma as one of the top 50 Most Influential People in the world in October 2015. In 2012, Sharma was selected as one of the top global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and in June 2013, Indian magazine Outlook named Sharma as one of The World’s 25 Smartest Indians. The World Economic Forum in Davos selected him as one of the world’s “Top Young Leaders” in 2007. GQ India named him the Global Indian of the Year in 2016.
Passionate about politics, Sharma has covered every national election in India, and many major state contests, going back to 1998. These travels are captured in his 2019 book, “Democracy on the Road: a 25-year Journey Through India.”