The man who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and helped wealthy Chinese move to Canada sees a familiar picture in America

Nuri Katz has spent 34 years moving the world's ultra-rich from one country to another, and now Americans top the list: "I've never seen that before."

Nuri Katz was a 24-year-old college student when he moved to Moscow in 1990 from his native Montreal. Though he didn’t plan to stay long, he ended up living there for two decades—long enough to watch the Soviet Union come apart at the seams.

“I would have looked at you like you were crazy if you’d told me it was going to happen,” the founder of Apex Capital Partners told Fortune in an interview, calling in from a financial compliance conference somewhere in his perpetual blur of travel. “I watched the Soviet Union fall apart, and it fell apart because Ronald Reagan outspent them and they went into such huge debt that they spent themselves out of a country.”

The veteran of what he calls the “investor immigration” sector—helping wealthy individuals move their residence from one country to another—said he sees ominous signs now. “I lived through hyperinflation,” Katz said, “I don’t think people understand how dangerous that is, once the lid comes off and they have to start printing money.”

Thirty-four years later, Katz’s Apex Capital Partners is one of the world’s leading Citizenship by Investment advisory firms, helping wealthy clients from China, the Middle East, Africa, and increasingly, the United States, obtain second passports and diversify assets abroad. He has watched empires wobble from close range his entire adult life. And when he looks at America right now, he sees something he has never seen before in his industry, which he says wouldn’t exist without the big changes that shook the ultrawealthy of Hong Kong in the 1980s, when the UK colony handing over to the mainland became a reality.

“China has been the biggest market for investor immigrants since the industry started,” he said, but is America emerging as the new China of the 2020s? “Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “Yes it is. I’ve never seen that before.”

The numbers behind the instinct

Katz isn’t operating on instinct alone. In June, Apex released a proprietary survey of 1,733 Americans with household incomes above $200,000—and the results rattled even him. Sixty-one percent said they would consider leaving the United States within five years. Nearly 63% said they had considered diversifying assets outside the country. Three in four expressed concern about the future of the U.S. in relation to the Iran War.

“I don’t want to say shocked,” he says of seeing the numbers. “But I was surprised. That’s a blessing for my company—but a problem for the U.S.”

What surprised him most wasn’t the scale of the sentiment. It was the reason. Cost of living and taxes ranked above political climate as the primary driver—cited by 68% of those open to emigrating, compared to 54% who named politics. For a firm whose clients have historically been motivated by political anxiety, the economic signal was new.

“In all honesty, most of our clients [used to be] related to politics,” he said. “But we’re seeing clients from both sides of the aisle now. People on the left are afraid of Trump and what it’s going to mean for the country and whether or not Trump is going to, for example, run for a third term. The people on the right who are supporters of Trump are afraid of a reaction to Trump being a stark move to the left with a socialist coming into power—and we see the popularity of socialist politicians now as well, so both sides are incredibly nervous.”

The dollar question

Beneath the politics, Katz hears something deeper in his client conversations: a structural reckoning with the U.S. dollar and the ballooning national debt that he believes is only beginning to surface in mainstream discourse.

“Most entrepreneurs and most wealthy people are very concentrated in U.S. dollar assets,” he says. “Their 401(k)s, their real estate, their stock portfolios. Very few keep assets in euros or Swiss franc-denominated holdings. a vast majority of Americans are very invested in U.S. assets and they are starting to understand that they need to diversify.” He added that they are “coming to the understanding that the U.S. dollar isn’t going to be the reserve currency forever and it might end sooner than later.”

He pointed to another problem that “people are seeing very clearly: it has this little thing called the national debt.” He said he sees the $39 trillion national debt (and growing) as a forcing function—and offered a stark binary for how it resolves. “There are only two ways to work out of that debt,” he predicted, with one being “printing more money and creating higher inflation.” This would be the kind of inflation that America has never seen, “which will make the post-COVID inflation look like kindergarten.” The other option is America defaults on its debt, with an obvious problem: “that ends the financial world.” Katz scoffed at the promise of AI productivity boosting the economy to the point where it grows out of its debt problem. “And Santa Claus is coming next week,” he joked.

It is, he acknowledged, a dire framing, but he watches currencies and pointed out that both the Russian ruble and Israeli shekel have gained against the dollar this year. And he has watched a superpower’s currency become worthless in real time. “Think about life insurance,” he says. “If you’re buying a $1 million policy today, you think that’s real money. But years from now, $1 million won’t buy you chewing gum.”

Katz is not alone in this diagnosis. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates and one of the world’s most closely watched macro investors, has spent years warning about what he calls the “big debt cycle,” arguing in his 2021 book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order that the U.S. is in the late stages of a pattern he has traced across centuries of reserve currency history. “I look at them as part of a Big Cycle that has repeated many times,” Dalio wrote on LinkedIn earlier this year. “For me, watching what is happening is like watching a movie I’ve seen many times before.”

Independent research supports the Katz-Dalio thesis. The Henley Private Wealth Migration Report for 2025 found a record 142,000 millionaires relocated countries that year, projected to rise to 165,000 in 2026. Katz told Fortune about what he thinks has changed.

The sentiment is becoming action

Before COVID, Katz said, Americans barely registered in the investor immigration industry. But that has changed dramatically.

“The rate of growth in interest from North America is the fastest of any country in the world,” he says. “Before COVID, the percentage of Americans applying for second residences or citizenships was minimal. Now it’s growing by hundreds of percentages a year. The sentiment starts somewhere—and then it turns into action over time. We’re seeing that action now.”

The survey data bears this out directionally, even if it captures intent rather than movement. Forty-two percent of high earners rated the U.S. economy as weak or very weak. Three in four expressed alarm about the Iran War. And the destination preferences—42% favoring Europe, 18% Canada, 16% the Caribbean—are already shifting as the golden visa landscape evolves.

Katz was cautious about the European enthusiasm. The EU itself is “dysfunctional” while many European economies are in “a state of flux, in big trouble.” Although statistics are disputed and Katz noted the differing opinions on European vs. American productivity and quality of life, he characterized most wealthy European countries as “just bleeding money” and predicted that his clients will realize “Europe isn’t the solution and they’re going to be looking elsewhere.” Portugal shuttered its residential real estate golden visa pathway in 2024. Spain has tightened its program. Italy’s option remains, but the map is in flux.

The next frontier, he believes, is the Caribbean, and potentially Argentina, which he says is developing the first Citizenship by Investment program in South America, expected to draw significant American interest given its time zone, hemisphere, and business climate reforms. He himself lives in Antigua, having been born in the U.S. and grown up mostly in Montreal, where he made his entry into the burgeoning investor immigration economy, as Hong Kongers sought a release valve, often to Vancouver.

The view from here

Katz has made a career of helping people replicate, in some form, the same optionality that he had as he moved between countries—the freedom that comes from not being entirely dependent on any single country’s fate.

He is careful not to be apocalyptic about America. He is not predicting collapse. He is predicting something more mundane and in some ways more insidious: a slow erosion of confidence among the people most capable of voting with their feet, and their capital.

Katz has been in this business in 34 years and he often thinks back to his time in Moscow in the early ’90s—the hyperinflation, the chaos, a superpower undone by debt it could no longer carry. “Anything can happen in the world.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com