The Hyperrealist

The current issue of The New Yorker has a profile of hedge fund manager Ray Dalio (founder of Bridgewater Associates).  The article is entitled Mastering the Machine: How Ray Dalio built the world's richest and strangest hedge fund.  An interesting article and company - from the "What's going on in the world?" weekly staff meetings, to transparency management ("radical transparency"), to "ego sensitivity as the biggest problem that humanity faces."  Dalio is a "macro" investor, which means that he bets mainly on economic trends, such as changes in exchange rates, inflation, and G.D.P. growth.

He is a Harvard MBA and No. 55 on the Forbes 400 list.  A "hyperrealist" who in October 2008, in an essay entitled "A Template for Understanding What's Going On" stated that the economy faced not just a common recession but a "deleveraging" - a period in which people cut back on borrowing and rebuild their savings - the impact of which would be felt for a generation.  Dalio thinks we are still in a deleveraging period and will be in one for ten years or more.

This is from the article:

"Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as way to deal with their debts (see previous blog Debt Monetisation), which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets.  "There hasn't been a case in history where they haven't eventually printed money and devalued their currency," he said.  Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don't have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo "classic depressions," Dalio said."