The Quadrillions Are Coming
How to position your investments for the future global economy
Ric Edelman: It's Tuesday, June 11th, and the quadrillions are coming. You know, I always like to focus on the future and what's coming down the road. And I've got something that is coming by around the end of the decade. Plus or minus one year. Maybe 2029, maybe 2031. Pretty soon, the quadrillions are going to be here.
What on earth is a quadrillion? Well, it's a really big number, is what it is. It's a one followed by 15 zeros. It's a thousand trillions. Well, we know the progression of numbers, right? You start with one, that's a one followed by, well, nothing. Then 10, that is the number one followed by a single zero. Hundred, one followed by two zeros. And then a thousand, which is a hundred tens, a million, a billion, a trillion, and then quadrillion. In other words, a million is a thousand thousands, a billion is a thousand millions, a trillion is a thousand billions, and a quadrillion is a thousand trillions. Why am I saying that this is in your future?
Well, it's real simple. Global wealth right now is about $730 trillion. And at the rate of growth of the global economy, we can expect that by the end of the decade, we are going to have not $730 trillion around the world between the total value of the global stock market, the global bond market, the global real estate market, the global gold market, all of the cash that's floating around the world. That's about $56 trillion, by the way. We're talking about a total net worth of all the wealth in the world. Right now, $730 trillion. It's soon going to be a thousand trillion, and a thousand trillion of that is a quadrillion. So yeah, we're going to have a new word in our lives, something that you're going to start to hear about pretty soon.
The only question that I have for you is, how much of that do you want a piece of? You see, we have to recognize that wealth grows on a pretty steady basis. Oh, sure. In any given one year, we might have volatility such as 2022. We certainly saw a big crisis in 2020 due to the pandemic, go back to 2008 with the credit crisis. We can go back to the .com bubble of 2000. But quite frankly, they're so memorable because they are such anomalies. We don't really talk about how things are when they're going well, and that's most of the time. It's kind of like airplane crashes. As horrible and tragic as they are, they're news because they're so uncommon.
We don't talk about people who get into car crashes every day because that happens to the degree of tens of thousands of them. Fortunately, most are just fender benders. But this is why we need to recognize that most of the time the financial markets are doing just fine. Thank you very much. Generally speaking, the stock market rises, the bond market rises, real estate market rises, gold rises, energy rises. Even cash rises in value because of the interest you're earning on it. And this is why we need to acknowledge the fact that where we used to think that a million dollars was a lot of money, Well, nobody seems to get terribly excited about lotteries until the big winning ticket is going to get a billion dollars. And I think it was back 20, 30, 40 years ago when a senator said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.” Well, nowadays we're talking in the trillions of dollars. And in the case of global GDP, the hundreds of trillions of dollars. To the point that by around 2030, eh, give or take a year, depending on the performance of the financial markets between now and then, global economy is going to be one quadrillion.
In other words, we've used the letter M as a shortcut for million, and the letter B is the shortcut for billion, and the letter T is a shortcut for trillion. You know, one M, one B, one T. Well, get ready, because in your future, we're going to be talking about one Q. These numbers are astronomical. They're huge in size. We need to get used to them, and this is pretty darn exciting. This is why I encourage you to pay a lot of attention to this, and recognize the question that I posed you a moment ago. How big a piece of this is do you want? The bigger the piece you want, the more you're going to invest in the global financial markets. And we're talking stock market, bond market, real estate market, gold market, oil market, crypto market, cash market, you name it. That's what a globally diversified portfolio is all about. It's how institutional investors do it. If you look at pension funds and endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, this is how money is managed in today's world.
So, are you getting excited about the fact that a quadrillion is in your future? I'm pretty excited about it. And now you'll have a brand-new word to play with in your crossword puzzles, and to brag with friends that you know something that they yet don't. Quadrillion. It's coming, and it's coming real soon.
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Ric Edelman: Thanks for being with me here on The Truth About Your Future. Ric Edelman here. If you like what you're hearing, be sure to follow and subscribe to the show, wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, YouTube – and remember leave a review on Apple podcasts. I read them all! Never miss an episode of The Truth About Your Future. Follow and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
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