Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Ray Dalio (Transcript)

Full text of author Ray Dalio’s talk titled ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order’.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ray Dalio – Author

The changing world order — the times ahead will be radically different from those that we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, though similar to many times before.

How do I know that? Because they always have been.

Over my roughly 50 years of global macroeconomic investing, I’ve learned the hard way that the most important events that surprised me did so, because they never happened in my lifetime.

These painful surprises led me to study the last 500 years of history for similar situations where I saw that they had indeed happened many times before, with the ups and the downs of the Dutch, British and U.S. empires. And every time they did, it was a sign of the changing world order.

This study taught me valuable lessons that I’m going to pass along to you here in a distilled form. You can find the comprehensive version in my book “Principles for Dealing With The Changing World Order”.

HOW I LEARNED TO ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE BY STUDYING THE PAST

Let me begin with a story that brought me to this point about how I learned to anticipate the future by studying the past.

In 1971, when I was a young clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the United States ran out of money and defaulted on its debts. That’s right; the U.S. ran out of money. How?