Ray Dalio: why I recommend being a catalytic leader

Catalytic leadership is the spark that lights the fire of much bigger changes. It comes from people working well together to bring influence, intelligence, financial resources and/or time to produce big double bottom line returns. By “double bottom line”, I mean investments that have positive returns both socially and financially.

Being a catalytic leader is becoming more popular because more and more people who have a lot of capital are looking at what is happening in the world and facing the same question: what do you want to do to make it better? 

How we answer this question is mostly a function of our backgrounds, our objectives and the perspectives we have acquired along the way.

In my case, I grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the U.S., believing it to be a land of opportunity, and fell in love with playing the markets when I was a child. Today, I have been a global macro investor for about 60 years and a philanthropist for about 30. 

When considering how to invest my money, I know that I want to have a beneficial impact on people and nature, and that I do not want to overspend on myself and my family.

This background and how I see things also affects how I understand what is now happening in the world and what I want to do about it. 

Forces driving global macroeconomic change

My need to study global macroeconomic conditions to succeed as an investor has led me to conclude that we are probably at the start of a very difficult period caused by a classic confluence of five big forces: 

Unsustainable government debt burdens that are threatening the existing monetary........

© Fortune