Book ReviewLifestyleVOLUME 16 ISSUE # 04

Big Debt Crises

For the 10th anniversary of the 2008 fi-nancial crisis, one of the world’s most successful investors, Ray Dalio, shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well. This template allowed his firm, Bridgewater Associates, to anticipate events and navigate them well while oth-ers struggled badly. As he explained in his #1 New York Times Bestseller, Princi-ples: Life & Work, Dalio believes that most everything happens over and over again through time so that by studying their patterns one can understand the cause-effect relationships behind them and develop principles for dealing with them well. In this 3-part research series, he does that for big debt crises and shares his tem-plate in the hopes of reducing the chances of big debt crises happening and helping them be better managed in the future. The template comes in three parts: 1) The Archetypal Big Debt Cycle (which explains the template), 2) 3 Detailed Cases (which examines in depth the 2008 fi-nancial crisis, the 1930’s Great Depression, and the 1920’s inflationary depression of Germany’s Weimar Republic), and 3) Compendium of 48 Cases (which is a compendium of charts and brief descriptions of the worst debt crises of the last 100 years). Whether you’re an investor, a policy maker, or are simply interested, the unconventional perspective of one of the few people who navigated the crises successfully, Princi-ples for Navigating Big Debt Crises will help you understand the econ-omy and markets in revealing new ways.

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