Ray Dalio: Our System Is in Jeopardy - Debt, AI & the Cycle That Destroyed Rome
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Ray Dalio, welcome back to the All In Podcast. Third time's the charm. Thanks for being here.
It's always a a blast to be here. Thank you for having me.
The last conversation we had was so popular and it was so timely because it was just a few days actually after the inauguration of president Trump, and you had provided some very kind of prescient outlooks for the administration that I think we all thought would be very helpful to get on the record. At the time, you had highlighted and and as you have been for some time, this great debt cycle we're in, the fiscal and monetary policy issues that are driving that debt cycle, and provided some input that if we were able to cut our deficit to GDP to roughly 3%, we may have a shot at a smoother tra
I'm going all here.
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I've studied these big cycles in history going back five hundred years and there are five big forces that are intertwined to determine the answer to your question which is there's the debt money one and I'll I'll take you into that in a minute. There is the domestic gaps, the wealth and values gaps that are causing irreconcilable differences between the left and the right that is affecting how taxes, democracy and everything works. There's the international great power conflict, the classic rising of a great power, challenging existing great power, and changing the international world order. T
You highlighted this problem, you provided a diagnosis that if we could get to three percent, we could soften the effects, but it hasn't happened. We were all very hopeful last year around this time when Elon Musk decided to lead DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, he was gonna go in and there were gonna be these kind of big sweeping changes to reduce government spending, find fraud, waste, and abuse, and so on. Did Doge fail because the actions that were taken were wrong, or did Doge fail because the system itself cannot be changed at this point in the cycle? That there's too much
Yeah, you're talking about taking an inefficient government and making it efficient. Okay? And having to do it quick because there are elections and if people don't like it then you know you lose your mandate. And in a society in which no matter what you do you're criticized and torn down. So you know we have the fact of the question of does democracy and our system lend itself toward the sort of executive leadership that both makes it efficient and makes it acceptable for all people. You know, there was a lot of cutbacks, know, things like school lunch programs and things, know, and then tryi
Right. So it might just be structurally it's a little difficult at this stage.
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