On September 12, 2026, eleven governments sat down in New Delhi and did something BRICS hadn’t managed in years: agree on a joint declaration without a single member objecting. Within 48 hours, the world’s press had read that same document in three different ways. The South China Morning Post’s headline said BRICS had taken a step towards de-dollarisation. The Diplomat, reporting from inside the summit, said the New Delhi Declaration made no mention of de-dollarisation at all; it simply backed more trade in national currencies, a far softer commitment. A third outlet called it the most ambitious challenge to the dollar-dominated financial order BRICS has mounted so far.

Three readings of one two-day summit, and none of them is technically wrong. That’s usually the tell that a story isn’t really about what got said in the room—it’s about what “threat to the Western-led order” is even supposed to mean, a quarter-century after Goldman Sachs coined the acronym as a stock-picking shorthand, not a geopolitical project. Settling that takes the trade, reserve, and lending numbers sitting underneath the summit, not the language of the communiqué.

What BRICS Actually Is Now

BRICS is no longer the five-country club of 2009. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE joined as full members in January 2024, Indonesia followed in January 2025, and Saudi Arabia’s status is still, technically, unresolved—more on that later. The resulting eleven-member bloc accounts for something like 48% of the world’s population and, by the IMF’s purchasing-power-parity measure—how far a country’s income actually stretches at home, not what it converts to abroad—40% of global GDP, a share the IMF projected would edge up to 41% in 2025. Set against the G7, whose PPP share sat at 28.4% in 2025 on a population share of just 9.6%, the contrast is obvious: a bloc with roughly five times the G7’s population commanding a bigger slice of world output, at least by this one measure.

The bloc also sits on real physical leverage. Its own members put BRICS in control of proven rare-earth reserves at roughly 72%, alongside more than 40% of global oil production and most of the world’s coal. Intra-BRICS trade has grown 13-fold since 2003, to $1.17 trillion. The New Development Bank, the bloc’s answer to the World Bank, has approved 112 projects worth roughly $37–39 billion since 2015, with a stated goal of pushing 30% of its lending into members’ own currencies by the end of 2026. None of this is invented. It isn’t the whole picture either.

The Bloc’s Own Case And Where It Gets Confusing

The claim BRICS officials repeat most often is the PPP crossover: the bloc first overtook the G7’s share of global output somewhere around 2018 or 2019, depending on whose dataset you use, and the gap has only widened since. That’s real. What’s harder to reconcile is that two credible analyses, published months apart in 2025, put BRICS’s 2025–26 PPP share at two very different numbers. One, tracking the original five-country trend line, puts it at roughly 34.6%. Another, using the IMF’s figures for the now eleven-member bloc, puts it at 40–41%.

Both numbers are correct. They’re just counting different things. The first tracks how much Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have organically grown relative to the G7 over two decades. The second folds in Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, the UAE and, nominally, Saudi Arabia – economies that didn’t get bigger in........

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