The Great Global Rebalancing: How Trump's America is Losing its Grip on the World's Capital with Sony Kapoor

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Everyone watched Trump at Davos and thought they were seeing American power. We think they were seeing something else: a flashing warning light. The core idea of this podcast is simple: diversification is the oldest rule in investing, and the world has ignored it. We’ve funnelled a staggering share of global capital into the United States, treating U.S. markets and Treasuries like the default “safe” option. But now, with Trump openly threatening tariffs on anyone who dares to sell U.S. assets, the message is out in the open: America knows capital flight is the real threat. We start with an origin story, Henry Lowenfeld, the overlooked pioneer of diversification, and use it to decode what’s happening now: a long-overdue global rebalancing. Then we’re joined by financial strategist Sony Kapoor, who makes the case that U.S. assets are increasingly being priced not as a safe haven, but as a political risk, and that a weaker dollar, new hedging demand, and a search for opportunity outside America could reshape markets for a generation.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:07.0	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:13.2	How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And I think the podcast is going to do what most people around the world have been doing
0:20.8	is trying to digest precisely what happened last week at Davos,
0:27.4	what it means for the economy, what it means for global markets,
0:31.6	what it means for geopolitics and the new buzzword John of the year,
0:36.8	which is geo-economics, which we will look at.
0:40.1	Which we will own.
0:41.6	Which we will own, absolutely.
0:43.5	Anyway, I'm going to start with the basis of today's podcast is going to be on one of the oldest, oldest truisms about investing. Right. And it's called the diversification of risk. So we're not going to start with Donald Trump. We're not going to start with Elon Musk. I was desperate to start with Donald. Well, we will. We'll come back to him. But I'm going to give you a bit of history. Yeah, economic history. Go on. I'm going to talk to you about a man. The hero of this podcast is going to be Sonny Kapoor, who was one of the great, great financial minds. He's going to come on later on and explain something to us. He actually explained the whole world. It's going to explain why it's all been a good thing, right? Yeah. But, in fact, it's not about America's preeminence.
1:28.2	It's about America's decline.
1:29.7	And that should be celebrated by the West of the world
1:32.6	because he makes the basic idea,
1:35.1	and so a very good point,
1:36.5	that America has 4% of the world's population,
1:39.1	2% of the world's population under 18,
1:42.7	and yet gets 70% of the world's speculative capital.
1:49.0	Yeah.
1:49.4	Right?
1:50.0	And attention.
1:50.9	And attention.
1:51.5	But the most important thing is a capital.
	...

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