Dalio's "World order changes" that are underway

Ray Dalio has earned credibility by successfully building an investment company in the U.S. For some time, he has been publishing his methods and sometimes an opinion he has derived, for the benefit of the world. 

Even Ray knows that it is impossible to accurately predict things but in this summary he notes "five big forces that have intensified to reach levels that are consistent with past big changes in the world order and are driving just about everything. He published his description of these changes in April and events since then make them worth watching.

Further detail via his websites and book e.g. - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-we-big-cycle-brink-period-great-disorder-ray-dalio/?published=t

1. The creation of enormous amounts of debt bought by central banks via their printing of money and buying the debt (i.e., monetizing debt)—in other words, the government financing itself in a big way by both borrowing a lot and printing a lot of money.  
2. Big conflicts within countries (now most importantly the US) prompted by the largest wealth and values gaps in our lifetimes, which are leading to the emergence of populists of the left and the right who are fighting with each other.
3. Big conflicts between countries arising from the rise of countries (now most importantly China) that are becoming roughly powerful enough to be able to challenge the existing world powers (most importantly the US) and the world order (most importantly the American world order).
4. Acts of nature (droughts, floods, and pandemics)—i.e., climate change.
5. Technology changes—e.g., the First and Second Industrial Revolution, computing and the internet, AI.hey are worth watching

Past experiences - Lesson 5 - ".. the opposite of expert advice

 “Success follows the opposite of expert advice”

The banter often received by a consultant has been that farm success has come from the opposite of expert advice.

Though this is often said tongue-in-cheek, in other words it means that each farm must set their own pathway for future success. It requires people to “think for yourself”. Expert support services such as accountants, agronomists and consultants can be quite wrong because of their own limited perspective.

The suggestion to think-for-yourself may be “intuitive” and   insights from new psychology recognise that intuition can be the best guide to decisions. For instance, practicing farmers are likely to out-perform industry experts by using intuitive judgement.

Also, my Lesson Four adds to the model that successful farm businesses invested heavily in the business – building the asset value, rather than diversifying or accumulating cash. Cash was the priority in the past when the banking industry-imposed credit-squeezes. Now, a longer-term view should be possible and will reduce the stress of the short-term management cycle.

Lesson Three - “some farms seem to have good years every year”, means that successful farms must have developed special skills. These specific skills under-pin independent thinking (think for yourself, Lesson Five) aimed at personal goals (Lesson Two).

The first Lesson from past experiences is that success in broad-scale farming requires productivity improvement. Part of this improvement in the past was delivered by a more active Department of Agriculture. Commercial services now filling this role will first maximise their own profit, including to decide how this profit will be shared with farmers.

In the future, such productivity improvement will be complicated by the increased scale of farm assets which adds to the complexity of farm decisions.

My proposed model will benefit from further development with willing farms.

 A new model for farm management

I have developed a new model for farm management and would like to test its ideas with people who may be interested.

This model comes from experiences over decades of consulting to farms and combines some new, yet-to-be-applied science. It allows a unique broad view of a farm business, which minimises the chance of overlooking unexpected mistakes. This better matches how farms have succeeded over past decades than the management commonly suggested by current professionals.

The introduction to the new model is a summary of my experiences of farm success in five "Lessons" (see blogs).

Any discussions would maintain confidentiality to protect the intellectual property of the farm as well as that of my own.

David Rees

m. 0427 880 770