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Ray Dalio has become a kind of global “macro” oracle; someone whose broad views sway how investors, policymakers, and business leaders interpret a very unstable world. Even after stepping back from Bridgewater (otherwise known as the world’s largest hedge fund), his voice carries enormous weight because he’s been loudly warning that the post-WWII global order has broken down. According to him, it’s been replaced by a law of the jungle dynamic where superpower rivalry, economic weaponization, and political dysfunction are colliding and in new and bad ways. Hard to argue with that.
Dalio’s influence also comes from his long-running Big Cycle framework, which he details in his book somewhat ominously entitled, The Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. Though it covers a lot of geopolitical and macroeconomic ground, the book’s bedrock idea is that history moves in predictable long-term cycles, not straight lines.
Dalio uses the framework to underscore his belief that we’re heading into a period of ‘great disorder,’ much like we had shortly before WWII. Depressing or not, these ideas not only resonate, they shape conversations in those quiet back rooms where global power actually happens.
