Dalio On AI Bubble Nearing 1929, 2000 Levels: ‘Wealth Is not the Same as Money'
https://www.fa-mag.com/news/dalio-on-ai-bubble-nearing-1929--2000-levels---wealth-is-not-the-same-as-money-87991.html
Acadian Asset Management’s Owen Lamont has framed the clearest test of whether markets are truly in bubble territory around four conditions he calls the “Four Horsemen of the Bubble Apocalypse“: extreme overvaluation, widespread “bubble beliefs” (investors who admit prices are too high but expect them to rise anyway), a surge in equity issuance, and a flood of new market participants. Dalio’s comments map almost precisely onto the third horseman.
“There’s almost nothing that’s easier to produce than stock,” he said, describing how a company can raise $50 million, get valued at a billion, and mint a paper billionaire without a billion dollars ever changing hands. He’s identified surging stock issuance as one of the two primary forces that “prick” a bubble, alongside rising interest rates.
Jeremy Warner:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/30/a-year-from-now-nobody-will-be-talking-about-iran/
In the lead-up to the First World War, stock markets sailed blissfully on: not because investors were unaware of the ever-louder drum beat of impending conflict but because they collectively assumed none of the great powers would be stupid enough to stumble into the catastrophe of an all-out war.
That view was perfectly encapsulated in a highly influential book by Norman Angell, a British journalist, published a few years before the outbreak of hostilities. Angell’s The Great Illusion argued that the economic costs of war and the accompanying disruptions to trade were likely to be so devastating that nobody could possibly hope to gain by starting one.
Economic interdependence between industrial countries would be “the real guarantor of the good behavior of one state to another”, Angell argued. This had never stopped countries from going to war before but it was also true that the level of economic integration and interchange between elites in Europe at the time was without precedent. Sadly, it didn’t help. Yet markets refused to believe in bad outcomes right up to the point where troops were mobilized and borders closed.