Ray Dalio

Every game has principles that successful players master to achieve winning results. So does life.

I believe that the best we can hope for is highly probable. By putting them out there and stress testing them, the probabilities of their being right will increase.

I don’t think that anyone has worked harder for more years and with better resources to acquire these understandings and principles. They have rewarded me and others abundantly, and I don’t want them to die with me. I believe that the concepts I explain can make the world run better when put in the hands of policy makers and investors. Above all else, I hope you will take away from reading this book:

the Big Debt Cycle.

much more practical understanding of how supply and demand really work compared to the conventional economic thinking. This is covered in detail in Chapter 2

Overall Big Cycle, which is driven by the Big Debt Cycle and the other major cycles, including the big political cycle within countries that changes political orders and the big geopolitical cycle that changes world orders.

I believe that we are now on the brink of such a period of major change. If you read only one chapter in this book, Chapter 8 covers it.

But definitive answers don’t currently exist.

Can a big, important country that has a major reserve currency like the US go broke—and, if so, what would that look like?
Is there such a thing as a “Big Debt Cycle” that we can track that will tell us when to worry about debt and what to do about it?

the big, long-term debt cycle. Nobody acknowledges it or talks about it. I couldn’t find any good studies or descriptions of it in textbooks, and even the world’s leading economists—including those who are now running, or in the past ran, central banks and government treasuries—didn’t have much to say about this critically important subject when I explored it with them. That is why I did this study and am passing it along.