has the financial architecture we inherited been quietly outpaced by the length and complexity of the lives we’re now living?
Dear friends,
This is not the series of letters I imagined writing.
You’re used to hearing me talk about impact — about using investment strategy to build the kind of world we want to see. That conversation still matters deeply to me. But lately I’ve felt pulled toward something more challenging. Not what we want to create, but under what conditions we’ll be creating it — and for how long.
Something shifted inside me when the One Big Beautiful Bill passed. On paper, it looked like just another spending package. But what it revealed more clearly was something that had already been quietly happening for years: trillion-dollar deficits are no longer temporary responses to crises. They’re becoming the architecture of normal.
Today the United States runs deficits of roughly $2 trillion a year, which is about 6% of the entire economy. Meanwhile the economy itself tends to grow only about 2% per year in real terms.
Put simply: we are creating financial liquidity about three times faster than the real economy is growing.
If that pace continues — and most long-term projections suggest it will — the gap between money creation and real production widens steadily over the next twenty years.
And when that happens, capital naturally starts searching for things that are real, scarce, and durable — land, housing, infrastructure, energy, and other assets that can’t simply be printed.
That realization is what made the moment feel different to me. It wasn’t just another bill. It was a signal that the system we’re living in has quietly crossed into a new phase.
I’ve been sitting with that feeling ever since. Not with panic — I want to be clear about that. But with the honest attention you give to something when you sense the ground beneath it quietly changing.
My father, Les Borges, was a lifetime dairyman — he liked his Holsteins and loved making a living on the land. He used to say: “You feed the cows, you get milk. You save your milk check, you’ve got security.”
For him, it worked beautifully. He was born in 1942 and died in 2011 at 69, his life unfolding inside a financial world largely designed around people like him: a relatively stable currency, a predictable arc from work to retirement, and the reasonable expectation that diligent saving would be honored.
I think about his timeline often, because I’m 53 now — approaching the age he reached in the final third of his life. And yet I may have three or four decades of active, engaged living still ahead. Maybe more, if I’m lucky enough.
That’s not boasting. It’s a quiet reckoning.
The Longevity Arc
If the longevity researchers I’ve been spending time with are right, many of us alive today — perhaps especially those who are actively investing in our health — may live far longer than the systems around us were ever designed to support. A century ago, life expectancy in developed economies hovered in the late 40s. Today it’s near 80. For those with access to modern medicine and proactive wellness practices, living into the 90s is increasingly common. Some researchers suggest that for younger generations, lifespans approaching a century are a reasonable planning assumption. Yes, hard to fathom, I get it — but it’s true. If you have young kids today there’s a high probability that most of them will live 100+ years during their lifetime.
What this means, practically, is that many of us are not planning for 20- or 30-year retirements. We are planning for 40- or 50-year second chapters. More professional reinventions. More economic cycles. More policy shifts. And more time living inside the consequences of systems we help build today.
Previous generations often experienced those consequences through their children or grandchildren. That distance created a kind of cushion. Longevity compresses it. The world we help finance today may be the world we ourselves grow old inside.
That realization changed how I think about everything.
My father never used words like “fiscal dominance” or “monetary dilution.” But he understood something essential: the value of a milk check depended on the value of the dollar behind it. He trusted that yardstick. Most of us have, for most of our lives.
Yes, since 2008 the broad money supply in the United States has expanded dramatically. It was roughly $7.6 trillion coming out of the financial crisis. Today it sits around $21 – 22 trillion — nearly three times larger.
There is endless nuance available to anyone who wants to chase it — deficit financing, quantitative easing, off-budget expenditures, the true cost of wars that never appeared cleanly on any balance sheet. One could spend a lifetime tracing the plumbing of modern finance.
But the forest, once you step back far enough from the trees to see it, is actually quite simple.
The Generational Wave
There are essentially two forces filling the pool of liquidity in the global financial system. One is monetary policy — central banks expanding the supply of money. The other is fiscal policy — governments running persistent deficits and issuing new debt. Since the financial crisis of 2008, both of those forces have been running at the same time.
The result is that the number of monetary units in the system is growing faster than the goods and services the economy actually produces.
The pool of money keeps getting deeper, but the world it is trying to buy is not expanding nearly as fast.
If the same trends continue, the implications become even more striking. Over the past fifteen years the money supply has grown roughly 6 – 7% annually, while the real economy has expanded closer to 2% per year. If that trajectory persists, the broad money supply in the United States could reasonably grow from about $22 trillion today to somewhere between $50 and $80 trillion over the next twenty years.
The exact number matters less than the direction of travel. What matters is that the supply of money is expanding faster than the supply of real things — land, housing, infrastructure, energy, and productive assets. When that happens, capital naturally begins searching for places where it can anchor itself in something tangible.
It has been happening quietly for decades.
Where does that excess liquidity go? Into consumer prices. Into asset prices. Into both, in varying proportions, at different moments in the cycle. The exact percentages shift. The policy levers get adjusted. Economists debate the ratios. But the direction of the underlying current doesn’t change — and the structural incentives that drive it, from political to demographic to institutional, are not going away. If anything they are deepening.
This is the generational wave. Not a crisis to be predicted or a collapse to be timed. A slow, structural, self-reinforcing tide of liquidity that will almost certainly be larger ten to twenty years from now than it is today. The investor’s job isn’t to calculate it to the third decimal point. It’s to understand which way the water is moving — and to make sure the things you own are floating, not anchored to the bottom.
Expanding Global Liquidity
And then there is a third force — one that wasn’t fully visible when I began thinking about these questions years ago… but that has become impossible to ignore.
Artificial intelligence is not simply a productivity story — which is going to be significant — it is a liquidity story. As AI accelerates across the economy — displacing vast cognitive workers, restructuring industries (just wait until AI enabled robots are integrated at scale), and concentrating gains among a narrow set of owners and operators — the political pressure on governments to respond will intensify in ways that dwarf anything we’ve seen before.
The scale of workforce disruption AI is likely to produce over the next decade will make the COVID stimulus response look modest. And that felt like a mind boggling amount of money at the time. Governments will face a choice between allowing mass displacement to play out without intervention or deploying fiscal resources at a scale that has no modern precedent. History is fairly clear about which path nation states with central banks tend to choose.
What this means for the liquidity picture is straightforward but underappreciated: the assumptions embedded in most long-range financial projections were built for an economy that changes gradually. AI doesn’t change gradually. It compounds. And when a technology that compounds meets a political system that responds to disruption with spending, the result is not a modest acceleration of existing trends. It is a structural step-change in the pace of money creation — one that arrives on top of the demographic-based (more of us are getting older) and fiscal pressures already in motion, not instead of them.
I hold this not as a prediction but as a force to reckon with honestly. We may be living inside what turns out to be the most significant expansion of global liquidity in modern history — driven not by a single crisis or policy decision, but by the simultaneous arrival of an aging population, a fiscal system already running at capacity, and a technological disruption of a scale that governments will feel compelled to cushion at extraordinary cost. Each of those forces would be significant alone. Together, they point in the same direction: toward more money chasing a physical world that cannot expand nearly as fast.
Financial Longevity
I say all this with a bit of mixed emotion — my head understands it as a physics equation, yet my somatic body yearns for a soothing feeling around this transition, not the cortisol rush that is swooshing around right now.
What the numbers don’t capture is the feeling — the quiet sense that the yardstick my father trusted has been stretched in ways that don’t show up cleanly in any single data point. That’s what I find myself sitting with.
Lately, I’ve started listening more carefully to that background hum — the quiet contract that said: The dollar is solid. Hard work leads to stability. Saving will be rewarded. The hum hasn’t disappeared. But it feels different than it did. And when you stop trusting background noise and start really listening, you begin to sense that something structural has changed.
That’s the tension I want to sit inside with you over the next nine letters.
I’m not writing to predict a crisis. I’m not writing to alarm.
I’m writing because I think many of us — people who are thoughtful, values-driven, and committed to building something meaningful — are navigating an increasingly complex terrain with a map that was drawn for a different era. A map built for shorter lives, slower-moving systems, and a financial architecture that doesn’t quite match the world we’re actually living in.
What I’ve started to call “financial longevity” is my attempt at a more honest map. Not just capital that grows, but capital designed to remain functional, resilient, and meaningful across the full arc of a life — a life that may be longer, more dynamic, and more exposed to structural drift than anything our parents planned for.
This series is my effort to think that through out loud, with you.
I didn’t arrive here through forecasting models or market alerts. I arrived here through a decade of reading, conversation, and quiet meditation — through the kinds of sources and thinkers that don’t always show up in investment memos, and through long exchanges with people who were asking the same uncomfortable questions I was.
I arrived here by noticing the ground beneath the numbers — by sitting with the discomfort of sensing that something fundamental is shifting, and by asking what it means to live and invest well inside that shift.
My hope isn’t to offer certainty. Markets rarely provide that. My hope is to offer something quieter: a way of seeing that might help you think more clearly about what you want your capital to do — not just next year, but across the decades you may actually have.
Warmly,
Gino
P.S. In my next letter, I’m going to do something a little unusual. I’m going to write you a note from 2045 — a dispatch from the future designed to make the quiet drift we’re living through right now feel vivid and real. I think it will change how you read the letters that follow.