Investors shouldn’t stay on the sidelines in 2020, according to the Bridgewater Associates founder. This is where to be instead.
Ray Dalio had a message for investors in an interview with CNBC this week: cash isn’t the place to be now.
“Cash is trash,” Dalio said. “Get out of cash. There’s still a lot of money in cash.”
Dalio, speaking to CNBC at the World Economic Conference in Davos, said that investors shouldn’t miss out on the strength of the current market and they should ditch cash.
“Everybody is missing out, so everybody wants to get in,” the Bridgewater Associates founder said, adding that the last thing investors should “jump into” now is cash.
Dalio noted that the value of currency will be eroded by a weaker dollar and expanding money supply saying, “The depreciation of the exchange rate and the printing of money over the next few years is going to be the biggest thing. Cash is not gonna be good.”
Instead, Dalio says investors should opt for a diversified portfolio that includes at least some gold.
“You have to have balance… and I think you have to have certain amount of gold in your portfolio,” Dalio said. The billionaire investor also reiterated his call from last year that gold is set to be a top investment in the coming years noting that “a bit of gold is a diversifier.”
Cash isn’t the only thing Dalio railed against, he also warns that investors should stay away from bitcoin.
“There’s two purposes of money, a medium of exchange and a store hold of wealth, and bitcoin is not effective in either of those cases now,” he said.
Looking forward, Dalio doesn’t believe we’ll end up in an economic downturn this year and cautioned that investors should look beyond the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“If you get a downturn—and there’s a good probability in the next [presidential] term you’ll get a downturn—and you don’t have effective monetary policy and you have people at each others throats, I’m worried about that,” Dalio said, adding that “there’s a 20% chance every year [of a downturn].”
Dalio believes that the Federal Reserve is in a position now where it can’t stimulate the U.S. economy as it has in the past, given that interest rates are so low.
“You used to push a button and it would go up,” he said.
However, if interest rates continue to fall and politics remain highly divisive in the U.S., Dalio is concerned the economy won’t be able to bounce back from a downturn like it has in the past.
“We’re going to have larger deficits which we’re going to print money for,” Dalio said. “At a point in the future, we still are going to think about what’s a store holder of wealth. Because when you get negative yielding bonds or something, we are approaching a limit the will be a paradigm shift.”