One would begin to believe history might not be repeating itself, but it is undoubtedly starting to rhyme. During the great depression of the 1930s, the hardest-hit industry was farming. Farm incomes dropped by nearly two-thirds at the beginning of the 1930s. Dairy farmers dumped countless gallons of milk into the street instead of accepting a penny a quart.
Dalio warned recently in an interview through Bloomberg that the US might have to go through a similar type of inflationary debt crisis which is currently being suffered by emerging market economies like Argentina and Turkey.
Triple-digit inflation has taken countries around the world by storm in 2018. Argentina, Iran, Turkey, Sudan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe currently have annualized inflation at the hundred and 111%, 187%, 38%, 127%, 27% and 170% and that’s not even mentioning the total destruction of the Bolivar in Venezuela.
The United States currently has unprecedented debt levels which have been exacerbated thanks to the Federal Reserve artificially propping up the economy through a zero interest rate environment over the past decade. The access to easy credit has allowed consumers to blow up asset bubbles since the financial crisis of 2008.
Ray Dalio’s ideas about the US dollar has come from his recent book “A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crisis” in which he analyzes 48 historical debt crisis in order to show how they took place.
He states that most debt crises are very similar although Dalio distinguishes between those that are “inflationary” and “deflationary”.
“When it is denominated in a foreign currency, like these countries, which have a lot of Dollar-denominated debt, then they can have a problem servicing that debt. When the Dollar goes up they don’t have enough cash and they get into that spiral of printing money which devalues their currency and makes it even harder to meet their debt obligations,” Dalio says.
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