Financial problems and ideological differences are leading people to fight with an inability to compromise, he said.
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund manager, says our financial problems will help send us a version of civil war.
“The U.S. appears to be on a classic path toward some form of civil war,” he wrote in a LinkedIn posting.
“What is obvious from looking at many cycles of rises and declines of different historical cases is that the combination of:
1) financial problems due to not having enough money that lead to large deficits, high taxes, a lot of money printing, and high inflation, and
2) large wealth and values gaps in which people are more willing to fight for what they want than to compromise
leads to some sort of fighting for control, rather than compromising according to the rules,” Dalio said. That’s a “civil war, though these fights can be more or less violent.”
He said, “Notably, when that happens at the same time as there are foreign powers that are becoming strong enough to challenge the leading world power that is encountering this civil war dynamic, it is an especially risky period. That is the period I believe we are now in.”
Further, “by most of the measures that I use, the current financial conditions and irreconcilable differences in desires and values are consistent with the ingredients leading to some form of civil war,” Dalio said.
“We are seeing that they are leading to much greater amounts of populism/extremism and conflicts between the right and the left, which is classic. Both sides are fighting to win at all costs and are unwilling to compromise.”
