DALIO: RECESSION ON THE HORIZON, NO INFLATION
by ilene - May 29th, 2010 7:20 pm
Ray Dalio was interviewed in this week’s Barrons. In case you missed my previous post about Ray Dalio’s life philosophy, Mark Ames wrote a scathing article "TOP BILLIONAIRE HEDGE FUNDER SEES HIMSELF AS A HYENA DEVOURING WILDEBEESTS" comparing Ray to a hyena. Ray fan, or not, Pragcap recommends reading the full interview (subscription required). Here are some important points, courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist. - Ilene
DALIO: RECESSION ON THE HORIZON, NO INFLATION
Great interview in this week’s Barrons with Ray Dalio of Bridgewater. For those who aren’t familiar with Dalio he is the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world with $75B in assets under management. I highly recommend reading the interview in its entirety, but for those just looking for some highlights I’ve done the legwork for you:
On the stock market rally:
“It caused the stock market to retrace about 60% of its decline, and it caused the U.S. economy to retrace 40% of its decline. But it did not produce new financial assets. There has been very little new lending. The stimulus produced very little in the way of economic activity.”
On the bailouts and potential for recession:
“There is a lot of criticism about saving financial institutions and running a big budget deficit, but if the government didn’t do those things we would be in a terrible situation. It will be impossible to stimulate that way in the future because politically it is untenable. That’s a risk because, between now and 2012, the economy will probably go down again, and it will be important for monetary policy and fiscal policy to be able to be stimulative, and for the Federal Reserve to be able to purchase assets again.”
How soon will the recession occur?
“It will probably come sooner than most recessions do. Usually, there is about five years between recessions, but for various reasons related to the size of the debt, the next recession is going to come sooner.”
On the recovery:
“But it is a fragile recovery, and credit growth is not picking up very much, and it goes back to the fact we still have too much debt. We have not reduced our debt burdens in any way significantly. What we’ve done is to largely roll them to the vicinity of 2012 to 2014. Corporate balance sheets are much, much better because