The Economic Collapse You’ve Been Told Won’t Happen - Ray Dalio

60 years of global macro investing. Congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah. Bi- Bridgewater just cele- celebrated its 50th year, and I just, uh, celebrated passing it along. So yeah, thank you.

Yeah. Why, after all that time, why did you get interested in a changing world order and how countries go broke? Like, why does-

Oh, okay.

... a global macro investor do that?

Well, I'll, uh, I, I'll tell you a s- a story. Um, when I was (clears throat) between, uh, college and Harvard Business School in 1971, I was clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and on August 15th, 1971, President Nixon gets on the television and he says, "You know our promises to allow you to turn in those dollars for gold? Well, we're not gonna s- stick to them," and that wasn't his wording exactly (laughs) , uh, but, um, money as we knew it, which was gold, and the money, uh, as we now know it, which is fiat money, was like checks, uh, he di- he didn't, uh, we weren't gonna get our money. And so I walked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the next morning, clerking, and I figured the market would be down a lot, and it turned out it was up a lot and I hadn't been through a devaluation before, so I studied history then I found out that on, um, March 15th, or on S- I think it was March 3rd, 1933, Roosevelt did the exact same thing on the radio and I studied it. And as a result of studying that, I understood the mechanics of that, why the devaluation had that kind of effect, and I studied the Great Depression because I, what I learned was that, uh, it may not have happened in my lifetime before, these important things, but I need to understand them. So, I studied the Great Depression and that allowed me to, uh, make a lot of money and do very well in anticipating the 2008 financial crisis and then, um, to also, uh, the European debt crisis from 2010 to 2015. So, I knew that, uh, things may have happened before, so I then needed to study. So, there are things that are going on now that happened to happen in our lifetime before, and I figured, uh, that I needed to study that. Um, what causes the rise and decline of a reserve currency? Or what causes the rise and decline of a great power? And so I needed to study the last 500 years, you know, 'cause a rise and decline of a reserve currency or a great power c- takes arcs. You know, there's the British power, before that there was the Dutch, and so on, and I needed to study that. I studied that 500 years, and then I saw that the same things happen over and over again for the same reasons, um, and now I'm at a stage in my life where what I wanna do is pass along whatever I know to make it available to other people. I'm no longer, you know, um, focused in and keeping it quiet, um, and so that's why I studied that 500 year and that's why I, uh, wrote the, uh, book before the last one, the book before the last one is called Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order, and if you read it you see the pattern. And by the way, I also put out a free video for anybody, it's called the, on YouTube, Changing World Order. It's free. You can, um, you, you can listen to it. So anyway, that's how I came about all this. And, and need to study, you need to study the mechanics of things that have happened before because a lot of what's happening now is most similar to what has happened before our lifetimes.