Ray Dalio

People with credit do things with that.

They borrow.

If they can earn enough money to pay back, the system works well.

They create productivity.

They create opportunities, the capital markets and so on.

That's the monetary system.

And the way that works in the cycle is that when there's no debt,

such as in 1945, we start a new monetary order.

There's no debt, there's a system, and it builds up over a period of time.

And it's a mechanics that when incomes, when debt service payments rise relative to incomes, it squeezes out other spending the way it would do for you as an individual, the way it would do for companies, except governments can print money, but that squeezes out spending.

And that becomes a problem, and then you also have a supply-demand problem.

So when you have a new monetary system, which the United States had the new monetary system, and the dollar was the world's reserve currency,

then you can sell a lot more of the debt.

So there's a supply and a demand, right?

And so when that builds up and everybody's one man's debts or another man's assets, and they build up holding a lot of dollars in nominated debt, and then they sell a lot more debt,

Then there's a mechanics of that supply demand.

And then when you have politics and world politics, geopolitics enter into it, that monetary system is more at risk for those reasons.

We'll get into that.

But the first force of these five forces is the mechanics of this process, which is the monetary system.

The second is there's a domestic political order.