How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle

Ray Dalio’s How Countries Go Broke emerges from a lifetime of observing how nations manage—and mismanage—money. Dalio, the billionaire founder of asset management firm Bridgewater Associates, spent more than four decades studying global markets and advising policymakers during moments of extreme volatility, from the 1982 debt crisis to the 2008 financial meltdown. His previous works, especially Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises (2018) and Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (2021), established his reputation as a historian of finance—someone who treats markets as mappable systems rather than series random events.

In How Countries Go Broke, Dalio distills that perspective into a single unifying thesis: the economic destinies of nations follow predictable “Big Debt Cycles.” By comparing empires across centuries—from the Dutch and British to the modern United States—he turns financial analysis into a form of historical pattern recognition. His charts, models, and proposed “3% solution” aim to explain past collapses while offering guidance for preventing future ones. Dalio’s authority as both practitioner and theorist makes the book a warning as well as a manual for navigating the endgame of debt-driven capitalism.