Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio warned that the US is heading into ‘very dark times.’ How to protect your portfolio

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America has agelong been the world’s ascendant economical power. Yet, Ray Dalio — laminitis of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates — is sounding an unmistakable alarm astir the country’s future.

In an occurrence of The Diary of a CEO podcast, big Steven Bartlett asked Dalio if helium felt optimistic astir the aboriginal of the U.S. (1).

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“No,” was Dalio’s blunt reply.

To backmost up his response, helium pointed archetypal to America’s swelling nationalist indebtedness — hovering astir $38.7 trillion and climbing, arsenic of February 2026 (2). In fact, Dalio has agelong warned of a looming “debt decease spiral,” wherever the authorities indispensable get simply to work existing obligations — a dynamic that accelerates implicit clip (3).

On the podcast, however, helium besides highlighted deepening interior rifts successful the U.S. “There’s a combat betwixt the near and the close owed to wealthiness and worth gaps and radical not believing that the strategy volition enactment for them,” Dalio said (1).

“Democracy is astatine risk.”

If that wasn’t atrocious enough, helium went connected to emblem the intensifying “great powerfulness conflict” with China, marked by high-stakes contention successful technology: “We person a large exertion war, which tin beryllium utilized to make large advances but astatine the aforesaid clip could beryllium utilized for large conflicts,” helium cautioned.

“The victor of the exertion warfare is going to triumph each wars.” For humanities context, Dalio reached backmost to World War II: “Nuclear. Nuclear won World War II.”

It seems warfare is truly connected Dalio’s caput these days. In February 2026, Dalio warned that the U.S. is connected the brink of a “capital war” with its largest trading partners.

“We are rather adjacent to [capital war], and it would beryllium precise casual to spell implicit the brink into a superior war, due to the fact that determination are communal fears,” helium told CNBC’s Dan Murphy connected signifier astatine the World Governments Summit successful Dubai (4).

Referencing the Trump administration’s caller threats to Greenland, helium warned that galore European holders of U.S. assets could dump their holdings and make a “reciprocal fearfulness connected the portion of the United States that it could not get the capital, oregon not get the bargain [from Europe].”