Ray Dalio manages $100 billion. For some people that is a lot of money. For Dalio, it is another day at the office. Last year, his firm Bridgewater Associates trounced the market—his take-home pay was more than $2 billion.

His biggest successes have come over the past four years. As one of the few people loudly warning about the looming economic crisis in 2008, he was one of the even smaller minority who successfully navigated and capitalized on it. This gives him credentials not possessed by even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, or a host of other “experts” who now claim to be fixing an economy with the very same things that broke it in the first place (namely excessive debt and leverage).

Besides regularly beating the market, Dalio is described by the New Yorker as a genuinely likeable individual—unlike how many of the top brass at institutions such as Goldman Sachs come across. Recently, he joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in pledging to give away at least half of his money.

“We learned that beyond having enough money to help secure the basics—quality relationships, health, stimulating ideas, etc.—having more money, while nice, wasn’t all that important,” he and his wife wrote in a letter.

And now Dalio is warning that America and the world is heading back down again. As John Cassidy reports in the New Yorker, the coming downturn will be a long one—maybe, as Dalio warned in 2008, generational (emphasis added):

This spring, [Dalio] told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. “We are still in a deleveraging period,” he said. “We will be in a deleveraging period for 10 years or more.”Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo “classic depressions,” Dalio said. The recent deal to avoid an immediate debt default by Greece didn’t alter his pessimistic view. “People concentrate on the particular thing of the moment, and they forget the larger underlying forces,” he said. “That’s what got us into the debt crisis. It’s just today, today.”

Dalio’s assessment is alarmingly plausible. But when is this all going to hit? “I think late 2012 or early 2013 is going to be another very difficult period,” he said.

The world is heading toward another Lehman moment. Epoch-changing events are in motion—especially in Europe. Read Brad Macdonald’s column on Thursday to see what may be one of the biggest.