Ray Dalio

"Cash is trash. Get out of cash. There’s still a lot of money in cash."

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dalio argued that money printing and a weakening dollar would punish cash holders over the next few years, and advised a global, well-diversified portfolio with a certain amount of gold.

"Cash is not a safe investment. It’s a quietly bad asset class."

In an October 2020 CNBC interview ahead of the US election, Dalio doubled down on his cash view while outlining how investors should diversify for a contested-election scenario.

"I still think that cash is trash relative to other alternatives."

In an April 2020 Reddit ask-me-anything during the pandemic crash, Dalio reaffirmed the cash view he had stated at Davos three months earlier.

"In my opinion, we are at the beginning of a very classic late, big-cycle debt crisis when you are producing too much debt and have also a shortage of buyers."

Speaking at Bloomberg Invest in June 2023, Dalio argued the Treasury market faced a buyer shortage as deficits forced record issuance, citing institutional losses on long bonds and geopolitical shifts after the freezing of Russian assets.

"I think things are going to get worse in the economy; there’s a financial issue at the same time as you have this internal conflict, so I think that’s going to make for a risky situation."

In the same Bloomberg Invest appearance, Dalio described the outlook as a balance-sheet recession driven by debt rather than a household-led downturn, and said the debt market was at the brink of testing whether enough buyers would appear.