Jerome Booth

Jerome Booth co-founded and served as chairman of Ashmore Group, building it from a small investment bank subsidiary into a $75 billion specialist emerging market fixed income manager. He wrote "Emerging Markets in an Upside Down World" (2014), arguing that the conventional view of EM as riskier than developed markets is systematically wrong and reflects cognitive biases in how Western investors and financial institutions process information. After leaving Ashmore, he founded New Sparta, an arts media venture, while continuing to invest and write on emerging markets. Booth's intellectual contribution to emerging market investment theory — challenging the structural biases embedded in credit ratings, index construction, and risk models that systematically underweight EM assets — has influenced how more sophisticated institutional investors approach their emerging market allocations and risk frameworks.