Billionaire investor Ray Dalio is sharpening a simple but unsettling message for markets awash in soaring asset prices, which is that wealth is just a number unless it can be turned into cash you can actually spend.
In an X post on Thursday, the Bridgewater Associates founder wrote, “Wealth isn’t worth anything unless it can be converted into money to spend. And when there’s a lot of wealth relative to the amount of hard money available — like we’re seeing today — bubbles are created.”
Wealth isn’t worth anything unless it can be converted into money to spend.
And when there’s a lot of wealth relative to the amount of hard money available — like we’re seeing today — bubbles are created. @nikhilkamathcio pic.twitter.com/iBiRkkv7Ok
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Dalio attached a clip from a recent episode of “WTF is Finance,” a podcast hosted by Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath, in which he breaks down the difference between “wealth,” which he describes as notional asset values, and “money,” or spendable purchasing power.
A global macro investor for more than 50 years, Dalio cites a familiar startup scenario to Kamath where he says that if you sell $50 million of stock at a $1 billion valuation, you are, on paper, a billionaire, even though “nobody would pay a billion dollars for that issue combined.”
That gap between perceived wealth and hard cash, he says, is how bubbles form. Drawing on the 1920s US boom and other episodes, Dalio argues that people feel richer as asset prices rise, but “the wealth isn’t worth anything if you don’t sell it, convert it into money to spend,” a dynamic he says repeats across history.
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Dalio told Kamath that today’s “wealth-to-money” ratio in the United States is about 8.5 to 1, roughly 850% more financial wealth than actual money, a level he notes is similar to peaks before the 1929 crash and the 2000 dot-com bust. He has framed that imbalance, along with rising wealth gaps and populist pressure for wealth taxes, as a major vulnerability that can force asset sales and “pop” bubbles.
