Dr O'Neill, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

Thanks to RUSAL, HKUST is proud to once again present another distinguished speaker for the RUSAL President's Forum.

Our distinguished speaker today is Dr Jim O'Neill. Now Dr O'Neill has been called many names, all of them complimentary. Business Week calls him Goldman's Rock Star. The best known among these is probably Mr BRICs, after coining this term to cover the economic emergence of Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2001. Not many economists have created a term that has entered our lexicon in such a short time.

To get myself prepared for today, I visited the Goldman Sachs Asset Management website. There you will see a list of articles written by Dr O'Neill on many topics of great economic interest to the world. Among them are titles "The Swiss Franc Never Lies", "Has May Come Early? ", "May Has Arrived", "Gold, Myrrh and Incense" and of course "China, China, China." I am certain you will enjoy them as much as I do, be you someone who looks for a general education in the global economy, or one interested in wealth creation. You will find his way of using small telling details to explain big trends enjoyable.

For example, he will tell you whether China's one-child policy is working or not simply by describing his experience of visiting coffee shops in fashionable parts of Shanghai; he will give you fascinating facts as that the Chinese equity market is the weakest performer of the four BRIC markets since 2000 despite the fact that its economy has the fastest growing GDP, and more famously, he has also made accurate predictions about the fall of the US dollar against the Euro.

Dr O'Neill has a huge topic today, "The Challenging Dynamics of the World". Knowing his ability to build the conceptual from the anecdotal, I really look forward to seeing how he plays out the topic and hearing his insights. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr Jim O'Neill, the Chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the man they respectfully call the guru of the global economy. Thank you.