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Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who makes more money in a day than most Americans in their lifetime. Hedge funds are the top of the Wall Street food chain, and Dalio runs the largest one of all, Bridgewater Associates.

Dalio, a self-described "hyperrealist," is author of a book of maxims leaked recently via the financial blog Dealbreaker. Dalio titled his collection "Principles," and he makes every Bridgewater employee memorize it. This is what Dalio has to say:

When a pack of hyenas takes down a young gnu, is that good or evil? At face value, that might not be "good" because it seems cruel, and the poor gnu suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently "cruel" behavior exists throughout the animal kingdom.

Like death itself, it is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life. It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system, including those of the gnu, because killing and eating the gnus fosters evolution.

http://www.alternet.org/story/146964/top_billionaire_hedge_funder_sees_himself_as_a_hyena_devouring_wildebeests_/

John Perkins worked deep inside the forces driving corporate globalization. In his first book, "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man", Perkins told about his work as a highly-paid consultant hired to strong-arm leaders into creating policy favorable to the US government and corporations -- what he calls the "corporatocracy."

Perkins helped the US cheat poor countries out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could repay and then taking over their economies. The second book John Perkins authored is called "The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption."

Since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world's first truly global empire, and we have done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We have done it through economics very subtly.

The most common way we work is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations.

The money never actually goes to the country. It goes to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects -- power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways -- things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor.

The poor are not connected to the power grids. They do not have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it is such a big bet that the country cannot possibly repay it.

So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, "Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You cannot pay your debt, so you have got to give us a pound of flesh."

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/5/john_perkins_on_the_secret_history