While the world obsesses over new US tariffs and their impact on markets, billionaire investor Ray Dalio says the real story is getting lost. The co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, is warning of a much bigger, once-in-a-generation breakdown playing out in the background — one that's reshaping the global order.
“We're witnessing a classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders,” Dalio said in a post on X. And the recent tariff headlines? Just symptoms of something far more dangerous, he said.
Dalio urged investors and policymakers to stop getting distracted by “news-grabbing dramatic changes” like the tariffs. “If you allow yourself to be distracted by them, you will miss how the conditions and the dynamics of these big forces are causing these news-making changes.”
The five forces he flagged — unsustainable debt, a fracturing political system, the end of US-led global dominance, climate disruptions, and explosive advances in tech like artificial intelligence — are all colliding. But the real danger, Dalio says, lies in how they're feeding off each other.
“I also urge you to think about the interrelationships that are critically important,” he wrote, warning that failing to do so means missing how the “overall big cycle” plays out — a historic pattern that has ended past empires and birthed new world orders.
At the moment, a huge amount of attention is rightly being paid to the newly announced tariffs and their significant impacts on markets and economies. But very little attention is being paid to the circumstances that caused them—and to the even bigger disruptions likely still… https://t.co/wPIgzDscbk
He pointed to Donald Trump's tariff decisions as an example of how one headline event can ripple across all five forces — destabilising capital markets, deepening political polarisation, worsening global trust deficits, and even hampering climate action.
“This sort of breakdown occurs only about once in a lifetime,” Dalio said. “But they have happened many times in history when similar unsustainable conditions were in place.”
The fund manager also asked readers to look to history to understand what might come next. Study the actions that policymakers took in analogous past cases, he said, pointing to measures like suspending debt payments to rival nations, imposing capital controls to stop money from fleeing the country, and levying special taxes — all steps that once seemed unimaginable but could return as tools in times of extreme stress.
His message is clear: don't just look at what's happening — understand why it's happening, what it's connected to, and what could come next.
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