Ray Dalio & Andrew Ross Sorkin on His New Book “1929” and How Debt Drives Every Crash

2025-10-10

One of my principles is that if you’re worried, you don’t need to worry — and if you’re not worried, you need to worry.

That’s because worrying about what can go wrong will protect you and not worrying about what can go wrong will leave you exposed.

2025-10-08

The way I see it, any serious effort to solve the debt crisis will likely come too late.

It’s a timing issue. 2026 is a midterm election year — politicians won’t want to take the painful steps needed to improve our economic picture: cutting spending, raising taxes, and the like.

Any sort of bipartisan effort that comes after will both take time and be unlikely to be effective, because those commissions generally don’t work very well in practice.

That’s what it looks like to me. I’m curious to hear if you see things similarly.

@TheProfGPod

You can watch the full conversation here: _JLSAat94?si=AIGAM6BTiw7ZWCCC

2025-08-18

If you’re not generous with others and others aren’t generous with you, you won’t have a quality relationship.

2025-07-18

What happens when a country mismanages its debt?

In 1990, Japanese policymakers decided to deal with its debt obligations by printing a lot of money to buy bonds. They further devalued the currency by giving bondholders significantly lower interest rates than in the US.

As a result, Japanese bonds lost 45% relative to US bonds and 60% relative to gold over the next few years.

That had a real impact on the average Japanese worker, who lost a significant amount of buying power — and those impacts are still felt today.

My new book, How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle, breaks it all down for you.

#raydalio #principles #politics #economics

2025-07-07

An order is a governing system that helps people deal with each other in a structured way.

There are internal orders for governing within countries, and a world order for governing between countries.

Orders typically change after wars, when revolutionary new forces defeat weak old ones.

When this happens, new agreements and treaties are signed that detail how global governance and monetary systems will work moving forward. And a new world order begins.

#principles #raydalio #history #bigcycle

2025-07-03

History tells us the preferred path for government policymakers trying to deal with too much debt is lowering interest rates and devaluing the currency the debt is denominated in.

Doing this is a very hidden way of reducing wealth, because as your currency goes down, it makes it look like other things are going up. But despite the downsides, this wealth shrinkage and reduction in buying power is favored by policy makers precisely because its impacts are less obvious than the alternatives.

At such times, you should expect interest rates and the currency’s value to fall.

#debt #raydalio

2025-06-06

Remember that one man’s debts are another man’s assets. That means if you both weaken a currency and produce more of it, the value of that currency decreases.

This tradeoff is particularly challenging when a country has a large debt burden, like the U.S. today. In my new book, How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle, I outline a plan for how we can navigate this tricky situation. You can find it available to order here: https://bit.ly/3F5OFvN

#principles #raydalio #economics #debt