A hedge fund manager who predicted the 2008 financial crisis issued a grave warning about a potential calamity looming on America’s economic horizon should the president fail to steer the nation’s economic policies carefully.

Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, has voiced significant apprehension regarding the state of the American economy following Donald Trump’s tariff decisions, which have led to turmoil in the stock market.

‘I think that right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,’ Dalio confessed on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. 

‘And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.’

Dalio has shared his concerns about the potential downfall of the American economy, stressing that apart from the foreign tariffs issue, there are other risk factors at play that could contribute to a dire economic situation.

In a lengthy article titled ‘Don’t Make the Mistake of Thinking That What’s Now Happening is Mostly About Tariffs’ shared on X, Dalio outlined ‘underlying circumstances.’ 

He wrote: ‘Don’t get me wrong, while these tariff announcements are very important developments and we all know that President Trump caused them…

‘[People] are also mostly overlooking the vastly more important forces that are driving just about everything, including the tariffs.

One of the key dilemmas he discussed is that ‘monetary/economic order is breaking down’ because America is in an extreme amount of debt. 

‘Also, it should be obvious that the US government debt level and the rate at which the government debt is being added to is unsustainable,’ he asserted. 

The US is in about $36.22 trillion of debt, according to US Treasury fiscal data. About a quarter of the nation’s debt is owed to foreign investors, the Visual Capitalist reported. 

Dalio revealed on Meet the Press that economic issues are simply too dynamic to boil down to one root cause, referencing America’s convoluted external and internal relationships. 

‘Now, we are going from multilateralism, which is largely an American world order to a unilateral world order in which it’s great conflict,’ he explained. 

Multilateralism means countries are working together to tackle global economic issues, while unilateralism means one country – America in this case – takes actions without consulting other nations. 

Dalio said creditors, such as China, hold too much of America’s debt, and the US of domestic manufacturing makes the country too dependent on other nations. 

‘If they don’t, we’re going to have a supply-demand problem for debt at the same time as we have these other problems, and the results of that will be worse than a normal recession,’ he reiterated to NBC. 

In order for the Trump administration to do damage control, Dalio suggested Congress reduces the budget deficit to three percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), which measures a country’s economic activity. 

When Trump made his original tariffs declaration, Wall Street had its worst day since the height of the Covid crash. 

Since then, he has reversed most of the retaliatory tariffs he imposed on ‘Liberation Day.’ He lowered most taxes to just 10 percent, but hiked the ones thrown at China to 125 percent, Reuters reported. 

In 2007, Bridgewater Associates warned ‘imbedded risks in the system are quite large’ before financial devastation struck the following year, NBC reported. 

A few months later, Dalio said interest rates would skyrocket ‘until there is a cracking of the financial system.’