- Ray Dalio wrote in a LinkedIn essay Friday that he expects Bitcoin to do “relatively well” as government debt and deficit problems worsen.
- Three weeks earlier, on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Dalio said he still keeps only about 1% of his own portfolio in Bitcoin and prefers gold.
- The essay landed the same week the U.S. Treasury doubled the size of its long-term bond buybacks to ease pressure on yields, and Bitcoin rallied to roughly $77,000.
Ray Dalio wrote in a LinkedIn essay published Friday, titled “How Countries Go Broke: The Dynamic Behind What’s Happening Now,” that he expects Bitcoin to do “relatively well” as governments around the world struggle with debt and deficits.
The Bridgewater Associates founder has said close to the same thing before, in more detail and with more caveats, as recently as three weeks ago.
The Position Hasn’t Moved
On July 30, host Steven Bartlett asked Dalio about Bitcoin directly on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
“Yes, it’s a type of money that can’t be printed, but there are technologies that can hurt it. In other words, if there’s quantum computing and it can be monitored by governments and so on, it could be taxed.”
Dalio also said governments retain the power to move against Bitcoin if it ever became a real threat to their control of money.
“When the governments say, ‘I don’t want it,’ they have the power therefore to do whatever they want with it.”
At the time, he put about 1% of his own portfolio in Bitcoin, a figure he has repeated consistently since at least mid-2025, and named gold as the asset he actually trusts as a hedge. A year before that, in July 2025, he recommended investors hold up to 15% of a portfolio in gold and crypto combined, while stating plainly that he was “strongly preferring gold to Bitcoin, but that’s up to you.”
Friday’s essay reuses a title, “How Countries Go Broke,” that Dalio has now applied to a 2025 book and at least four separate LinkedIn and X posts since. The debt argument underneath it hasn’t changed. Neither has Bitcoin’s place in it: the smaller, more cautious half of a hedge built mainly around gold.
What Actually Changed This Week
What’s different this week isn’t Dalio’s view. It’s that the mechanism he keeps describing showed up in an actual government document.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury said it would double the maximum size of its long-bond buyback operations, to at least $4 billion per operation from $2 billion, covering 10-to-30-year debt, starting Sept. 9. Treasury framed the move as adding liquidity “in longer-dated nominal sectors.”
The 30-year yield eased slightly on the news but stayed elevated around 5.2%, well above the roughly 4.63% it traded at before the war in Iran.
Bitcoin gained about 22% over the week and traded near $77,000 on Friday. Market commentary tied the move to a combination of the Treasury announcement and President Trump’s renewed push for Congress to pass crypto market-structure legislation, not to Dalio’s essay.
The Treasury’s larger buybacks don’t begin until Sept. 9. Whether they actually ease the bond market, or yields keep climbing regardless, is a more concrete test of Dalio’s debt-cycle argument than anything in Friday’s post.
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