Ray Dalio, founding father of Bridgewater Associates and considered one of Wall Road’s most influential voices, stopped speaking about dangers and identified that the world order established after 1945 is collapsing and thus the planet has formally entered a stage of open battle.
The set off for this darkish evaluation was the unusually violent rhetoric popping out of the Munich Safety Convention, which concluded in Germany a couple of days in the past. In a wide-ranging publication on February 19, 2026, Dalio defined that the intervention of Western leaders has confirmed that the world has moved out of “Stage 5”, which is characterised by inner tensions. Enter “Stage 6” of his Nice Cycle theoretical framework.
To gauge the seriousness of this announcement, one must confer with the guide Rules for Dealing with a Altering World Order (2021). On this 80-year historic mannequin, Dalio factors out that the present state of affairs represents a turning level the place shared guidelines disappear, coercive pressure turns into rampant, and battle between nice powers turns into inevitable.
This paradigm shift was verified in actual time by the protagonists themselves. The Munich Safety Report 2026, with its large title “Beneath Destruction”, served because the backdrop for an approval that may have been unthinkable a decade in the past.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron be a part of Mr Macron in recognizing the dying of Europe’s safety structure. He explicitly urged the continent to organize for a struggle financial system.
Seen from the opposite facet of the Atlantic, the place was equally blatant. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described this situation as follows: A “new geopolitical period” wherein the previous world has definitively disappeared.
For Dalio, these statements are empirical proof of a “wrecking ball coverage,” wherein nice powers not search to reform the multilateral system, however somewhat actively search to dismantle the constructions of their rivals.
Shelter for transition and dysfunction
The transition to ‘Stage 6’ has vital implications for capital administration. Dalio warns that conventional methods that assume a steady greenback and perpetual development in U.S. shares have develop into a high-risk lure that would topic property to corrections of fifty% or extra.
His suggestions have been beforehand foreseeable lack of worth of fiat foreign money throughout wartime;buyers cut back their publicity to money and US-concentrated markets. The choice, as reported by CriptoNoticias, is to unfold threat throughout a “basket” of actual property, prioritizing bodily gold and inflation-linked bonds, historic havens that central banks have amassed through the years.
Moreover, Dalio reiterates Bitcoin’s usefulness on this protection. He describes it as “digital gold”, which is enticing to a brand new era attributable to its non-sovereign asset nature. Though the investor stated he solely held a “small quantity” for diversification functions, his involvement highlights rising mistrust within the solvency of the standard system.
Because it seems, that closing message is: Uncertainty is not a variable, it’s a fixed. Whereas the monetary sector tries to digest the tip of globalization, the political and financial consensus is aligned in a single route, the place it’s understood that the principles of the sport have modified and people who proceed to speculate in accordance with the twentieth century handbook threat dropping all the things.
