If Trump wins that election, obviously those two people will have less influence.
Elizabeth Warren will still be in the Congress, but Gary Ginstler will no longer
be the se C chairman. This will still be a new group of elites
that are running the SEC. So the question is, though, will that
be better or not? I don't honestly know the answer because Donald Trump has
spoken very negatively about bitcoin. This content is brought to you by Uphold,
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Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews I have with me
today Anthony Scaramucci, who's the founder of Skybridge Capital and Salt Conference as well
as an author. Anthony, great to have you back on it'sprazy to be
here with you. Man. I love your whole setup. I like the
bowl in the background. Of course. I like your bitcoin clock when it's
blinking green and heading north. But God bless you, thank you for having
me. Yeah, Anthony, you know I'm a big fan. We've talked.
We've spoken over the years. I noticed you just got back from Davos.
How was it and were there any major takeaways for you? Well,
you know, let me set the severe though. In twenty twenty three,
when I got back from Davos, I was interviewed by Bill cohyin from PUCK.
He said, would you learn in Davos? I said, well,
Bitcoin's going up? What do you mean by that? I said, well,
I didn't meet a person at Davos. I didn't meet a member of
the White Badge delegation. Those are the people that you know, are the
diplomats and the heads of state and policymakers and central bankers and CEOs of large
companies. I didn't meet one of those people that liked bitcoin or thought bitcoin
had any legs. In fact, many of those people were telling me that
bitcoin was a dead asset and it was a road to nowhere and soon to
be a ghost chain. And so what I find about Davos is the collective
wisdom of the elites because they're trying to impress each other, and you know,
that was the trend at the time. They all hopped out on that
and they got it wrong. And so this year there was a muted situation
in Davos. So meaning of you talk to somebody said, oh, I
hear bitcoin had a great year, but really, who cares. It's an
in significant asset and the blockchain itself is insignificant, and Web three is not
going anywhere, and we're traditional finance people. And then of course Jamie Diamond
gave a pretty high profile interview on CNBC where he routed bitcoin and other blockchain
oriented asset So I take all of that as extremely positive. And so that's
just my view. I feel like we have another great year in bitcoin,
not just because of the ETF and the having but because we still have fence
sitters and naysayers, and the way markets work tone is that you got fence
sitters and naysayers as they come off the fence and they stop nay saying,
the price goes up. If you have no fence sitters, you have no
nay satters, and you and I gotta be worried. We got to talk
about that being a top and Anthony, I almost treat Jamie Diamond now as
like a contrarian indicator, like if he's continuing his flood, I am because
I watched this man since twenty seventeen say the same thing and same thing.
But bitcoin continues to grow in price, an adoption. Now we have to
eat apps. It's historic. So it's like, okay, Jamie continue,
please, Yeah, well listen. I mean, he's one of the smartest
people in finance, but he's got invested interest in what he's doing, and
he's also got a way of thinking that has made him and his family over
a billion dollars. He's arguably one of the most successful financial services executives in
US economic history, sitting on top of a largest, most successful bank in
the history of the United States. So I have an enormous amount of respect
for him. But what I do find with people like Jamie of his vintage
of his eerror and I think Jamie's sixty seven. Now, if you don't
do the homework on bitcoin and you're opining on it, you're probably a pining
negatively because of your life experience. But if you do the homework, and
contemporaries of Jamie would include people like Stans Ruck and Miller, Paul Tutor,
Jones, Ray Dahlio. Those men, they did the homework on bitcoin,
and they drew a different conclusion and would I would say something to you that
I would hope your viewers and listeners would contemplate. The more homework you do
on bitcoin, the more you go towards bitcoin. I sort of feel like
bitcoin research and bitcoin due diligence is a one way ticket towards bitcoin. I
have yet to find somebody says, you know, I read everything, got
steeped in the understanding of the code. I got steeped, the understanding of
the network and the decentralized nature of the network, and the fact that hasn't
been hacked and has been up and running for fourteen years. I did all
the work, and I hate bitcoin. I have yet to hear anybody do
that. So you know, we'll get there. You know, Jamie's an
example of somebody that probably would needs to do the homework. Larry Fink,
on the other hand, You know, two years ago I met with Larry
and Abu Dhabi and we were in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel together.
He was very negative on bitcoin, right, and he said, well,
he was positive on stable coins, he had just made an investment in
Circle, but he was very, very negative on bitcoin. And here we
are two years later, he's all in and he's talking about the tokenization of
assets, the digitization of assets, and he's trying to make ibit, which
is the black rock ETF, the largest bitcoin ETF. In fact, if
you took the eleven bitcoin ets, this has been the most successful launch in
terms of aggregate dollars in ETF history. So I admire Larry, you know,
because Larry, you know what they say. You know, smart people,
when the facts change or they've been influenced by greater knowledge, they change
their decisions. You know, you don't have to stay in a certain realm
if that realm is no longer accurate. I can't tell you how many times
in my life I've gotten something wrong And what's the move? You got to
make an adaptation, and you have to admit that you're wrong and go in
a different direction. So I admire Larry think for that and not to focus
too much on Jamie. But at the same time, while he's saying all
these things, JP Morgan is involved as a participant with the et apps.
They're testing DeFi with Avalanche. They've been invested in consensus, which you know,
of course build ethereum. So it's fascinating that these two things are happening
in parallel. Is Jamie almost at the point where it would be embarrassing for
him to switch his opinion because he's made such a hard stance. It's a
good point, you know, I don't think so. I think Jamie's a
self confident guy, very secure. I think if he changes his opinion,
he'll say, hey, I got that wrong. I'm going to change my
opinion. I don't think he's gonna inject too much pride into that decision making.
Something else is going on. Actually, you know, there's pressure on
him from regulators. He's got to deal with the Elizabeth Warrens of the world.
There's pressure in the system as a traditional finance representative. But listen,
you know you know this and I know this. JP Morgan. As you
mentioned, they're an ap on the ets for people. They're producing research on
bitcoin, they have their own coin, they have built the element of the
blockchain. You can call if you're having an account at JP Morgan in the
private bank, and you call them and say, hi, unsolicited, I'd
like to buy twenty five one hundred thousand dollars worth a bitcoin something like that.
No problem, They'll buy for you and they'll put that cusiup in your
account. Sit there with the Blackstone Bitcoin Trust and is JP Morgan account.
Yeah, it's absolutely no problem. So right, yeah, well, they
definitely want to make money and we'll see what else they decide to do with
crypto. You know, speaking Elizabeth Warren, I'd love to get your thoughts
because we're going to talk a bit about politics and the upcoming election cycle.
We've seen this very hard stand from Elizabeth Warren. Obviously under the by administration
as well, there's been a lot of knee jerk reactions to crypto and look,
maybe FTEX didn't help that, but then you know, you have Gary
Genser who's under the control of Elizabeth Warren. He's losing in court, but
he's not given up, you know. If you think this thing ends after
the twenty to twenty four election, well, you know, if Trump wins
that election, obviously those two people will have less influence. Elizabeth Warren will
still be in the Congress, but Gary Ginstler will no longer be the se
C chairman. This will still be a new group of elites that are running
the SEC. So the question is, though, will that be better or
not? I don't honestly know the answer. Because Donald Trump has spoken very
negatively about bitcoin. Now, Vivic Bramaswami has convinced Donald Trump that he should
never have a central bank digital currency, so Trump is behind that. Now.
I think Trump also made some money on these NFTs that's gonna ask,
so maybe that's going to open his mind to the world of digital assets and
web three. But I don't think eighty year old people Donald Trump, seventy
five year old Elizabeth Warren, eighty year old Joe Biden are the right people
to make regulatory decisions about this asset class. So I don't necessarily think a
Republican win is going to be better. It may end up being worse in
some ways. So we'll have to see, you know, as it relates
to crypto in general. You know. Now, what's really interesting is yes
Againstler came out and said, well, despite the fact that we approved against
my greater wishes, we approve the ETF. I am now letting you know
that that may be the last one. I'm not going to approve the etherey
of ETF. And and you know, look, there'll be lawsuits about the
ethereu of METF, but I'll just give you his brand of thinking. If
he approves the ETF, and every one of those pillows behind you is going
to get an ETF, you know. And I don't think he wants that,
and so you know, we can argue about it, you know,
but I mean, and he could lose the court cases, but that doesn't
mean he doesn't have tricks up his sleeve to delay this stuff. You know,
that bitcoin ETF should have been approved in twenty fourteen, Yeah, you
know, and it would have saved retail investors. It created the Grayscale debacle
with the two percent fees in the discount and the surplus and all that stuff
that happened to the Grayscale Bitcoin trust. Because it wasn't an ETF, all
of that stuff could have been avoided. But you know, we're not in
it anymore for protecting the investor. We're not in it anymore for advancing financial
innovation. We're in it for politics. And that really sucks for the country
because I have met with people from around the world, particularly those in the
UAE. I've met with regulators, and the regulators say, yeah, no,
our politicians and our ruler is agnostic to our regulatory process. If it's
good for the country, and it's safe and sound and it's transparent, we're
good. There's nobody calling jab owning. Oh I woke up this morning.
Don't like crypto? Let's ban bitcoin in a country that has twenty two percent
of the world's GDP. Now these ETFs going live certainly historic. Do you
feel we've lost the chasm of you know, bitcoin and crypto going mainstream.
There's and there's no longer any type of hesitation or psychological barrier. You know
a lot. I don't know about this stuff right, or it's too complicated
for me to try to buy it on coinbase, But now it's Hey,
black Rock has it, Fidelly has it? I know these names, I
trust these names. Hi, everyone part in the interruption. I'm Tony Edward,
the founder and host of the Thinking Crypto podcast. I have a you
favor to ask you. If you haven't subscribed as yet on YouTube or the
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Thank you for your support, and I'll let you get back to the content.
Really really really good question. And so I think we have crossed that
chasm. I think this sloppiness is from the price differentials. Okay, So
if I own the Gray Scale Bitcoin Trust and it's finally traded back to par
and I bought it at a loss, maybe I bought those coins at fifty
sixty thousand, my proclivity is going to be to sell those coins, and
if I want to stay in bitcoin, to buy the bitcoin etf after I've
sold that. And so you're seeing a tremendous amount of sloppiness, you know.
I think there was another four hundred million dollars worth of bitcoin on chain
this morning, moved from the Gray Scale Bitcoin Trust into an exchange to liquidate
that, and I think they're going to have heavy selling. Now you'd say
to yourself, well, why did they go from two percent to one and
a half? Everyone's out else at twenty basis points. I think they need
the fees, and I think they're making the bad There's a lot of people
that have low cost tax lots, low cost tax bases and are not going
to necessarily sell to save one hundred and twenty basis points, which is the
net differential between the fees of the ETF and Grayscale. Do you feel that,
and I want to make sure I phrase this question correctly that it's almost
like the crypto startups, the kids, so to speak, are being put
to bed and the adults, the Wall Street firms are here. Maybe with
the exception of Coinbase, because Coinbase has gone public, it's shown it it's
a reputable business and company they partner with black Rock. But finance, it
looks like, you know, they're going to be under a scrutiny and the
biggest fine I think it is in settlement. And you have all these other
firms like Grayscale seeming like they're losing market share now. Really good question.
So so I obviously I think Coinbase is going to be fine. I think
that they are such a big part of the crypto ecosystem and all of these
ETFs are transacting with Coinbase. Coinbase has an interesting lawsuit going on right now,
Visa v. The SEC. It sounds like the judge is very well
prepared, asking super smart questions related to that lawsuit. It could come to
past tony where the SEC loses another case. Could you imagine that? I
mean, they would have lost the Ripple case, they would have lost the
Grayscale case, they lose the Coinbase case. I think at that point it's
a little embarrassing for them in terms of the way they're administering the laws.
I think it's prima facia they're acting as politicians and they're being politically influenced more
than they are adhering to or following the law. But when you talk about
grown ups in the room, Base we'll have its market share, JP Morgan,
despite the sentiments shared by Jamie Diamond, we'll have its market share.
Goldman has gotten into the mix. And yes, I think that the asset
class is growing up. I don't think some of the larger baby companies to
use your analogy. Are going to get hurt that badly because I just think
it's just going to be overall growth in the ecosystem. But you know,
it's not going to surprise me if we're sitting here a year from now and
the biggest brokerage firms have bitcoin available as an investment, the wirehouses have approved
it for their core portfolios. You know, you could have somebody like Blackrock
and their total return portfolio. It's a two trillion dollar portfolio. They say,
okay, we want a one percent exposure. It's two hundred billion dollars
in bitcoin. Just think of the magnitude of that, right, So maybe
the portfolio arrangement will eventually be sixty thirty, ten, ten go. Maybe
we don't know. Who knows? Yeah, I think it's amazing. I
think you can't see the future. But if the future is exponential by you
and I both believe, then it's very bright. The question is what's going
to happen your term. I don't know the answer to that. But are
we sitting here at an all time high between now and the end of the
year. We have eleven and a half months to go, and we have
a big having cycle taking place in April. Could bitcoin get through the sixty
nine thousand dollars level by the end of the year, I believe it will.
Yeah, selling will have abated from Grayscale and the machines of Wall Street
will be selling this idea to their clients. Yeah. And I've been talking
to quite a few of the issuers. Spoke to Kathy at Arkanbat and the
guys. It's a bit wise, and they have their marketing plans to educate
rias and wealth managers. It's coming. Man, even my own personal financial
advisor, you know, I've been talking to him about it for a while,
and you know, he's like, yeah, we can't touch you,
blah blah blah. Now that the ETFs are alive, it's a different story.
Everybody's curious. I mean, I mean, think about all the road
that we have ahead of us, right, I mean the road to get
here. All of these early adapters are being rewarded because it's now going mainstream.
But you're just getting started on the mainstream road. You know. To
put it into the context, there's only four and a half percent adoption globally.
That's roughly where we were in the middle of nineteen ninety eight for the
Internet and web one. So just imagine where we'll be in ten or fifteen
years. Yeah. Absolutely, It'll still be a nice young pup. I'll
be fighting to keep my hairline. What I'll be doing tell us about skyper
Bridge is a strategy. I know. Obviously you guys have been invested in
crypto and bitcoin, I think ether as well. Are you adding new tokens?
Are there any new things that you're looking at for twenty twenty four?
Yeah, well, you know, I always I'm very open about my portfolio.
We own Casper Labs, I own a small gaming token called vulcan Forge
as simple as Pyr. We own Algoran, which we think still has great
technology and just perhaps may have misfired as a layer one in terms of scaling
its TVL but I think their relaunch is going to go incredibly well. We
own Salana, and we own Bitcoin, and we're we've been buying Avalanche.
So to me, those are high quality, great core assets long term.
Some are more speculative, some are stable like bitcoin, and so even though
bitcoin has an eighty to one hundred volatimes, I still see that as the
granddaddy and more stable, and so for me you know, for Skybridge,
our goal educate our people, expand our market share. We have some private
equity securities that we're offering, you know through this. We have this thing
called the Skybridge Unicorn Recovery Fund. We've got investments in things like Klarna and
Liquid Death, which we think are going to be great free IPO investments.
We have our coin fund, which was up one hundred and sixty percent last
year. That's a diversified group of tokens. Some are the ones that I
just mentioned. And then we have our hedge fund fund of funds, which
had its best year in Skybridge's history last year. Our offshore fun up thirty
six, our on shore fund up twenty five. It's truly been a great
year for us, and I see that this year is being equally good.
You know, now, who the hell knows. I've been humbled by life
and morgage. Maybe I'll get it wrong, but the bitcoin goes to seventy
thousand this year, we'll be happy, Camper clients at Skybridge, both the
employees and the customers you're at Skybridge will be very happy. Now speaking of
market's outlook, and you know what may happen. We see the FED looks
like they're going to cut this year. I don't know. You know,
there's a lot of speculation on maybe a cut in March. Hey, whatever
it is. And look, eventually the money printer is going to have to
be turned on to print to pay for all the different things that are going
on. They've raised the debt ceiling and all these different things. What is
your outlook for the FED and how they will take action because that has affected
markets? Of course, Well, it's an election year, and so I'll
say a couple of things. The Stock Trader Almanac one hundred and twenty five
years of election year option cervation eighty five percent of the time the market goes
up in an election year. But we didn't bet against that trend. Secondarily,
sorry, excuse me. The FED has said that they're more or less
done raising rates, and it being an election year, and I know they
try to be a political they're sort of political. They'll probably start cutting race.
The question is how much will they cut and win? And I think
when they say higher longer, I just think it's going to be lower longer.
And what do I mean by that? Probably don't cut race until the
second half of the year, and then they cut them pretty quickly. But
I think that they'll probably leave people with an impression that they're not cutting him
in the first half, and then by June July they'll start cutting them.
Anthony. The history has shown us anytime the Fed pivots and they start cutting,
there is a pullback on markets. So you think it's going to be,
you know, maybe a short term pullback. It's going to be sharp.
But like you said, it's election year. Maybe they start the money
printer again and things are back to normal in a month or two. Yeah,
well, yes, you know, and the market's gone up a lot.
I'm talking about the stock mortgage. So if the Fed cuts rates and
the market doesn't move a lot, it won't surprise me because it's been anticipatory,
the same way Bitcoin went up a lot into the ETF news once it
got announced. Situated a little bit sloppily. But I do believe that interest
rates are the physical gravity of financial assets. You lower rates, you're going
to increase the value of those assets. It's just the way it works.
So lower rates will mean to higher bitcoin, lower rates wi mean to higher
ethereum, and so it'll be generally a good thing, will it happen instantaneously.
No, but will it happen? And sure, Remember these things are
what Buffett once said, the markets are a voting machine or a popularity contest
in the short term, but they're a weighing machine over long periods of time,
where they weigh the fundamentals of something. And so you could be sitting
here at lower interest rates and bitcoins set up over one hundred thousand. Not
impossible. Yeah, I personally think that's what's gonna happen. But I hoping
I'm right. That'd be really nice question for you for the election that's coming
up. I seen your tweets and now you talked about like you don't think
Trump is gonna win? Do you think Biden gets re elected? And I'm
hoping, I'm praying that we get some like fresh blood, younger like of
Avack or you know, I don't know. Sometimes I get frustrated with the
candidates that we have. Look, I mean, they think is not going
to be president. He's obviously dropped out of the race, and RFK is
not going to be president. He's in a third party. He's not gonna
get enough of the vot vote. The question is is Trump going to be
president again, and so I don't see it because the country's gotten browner and
blacker. The mosaic of the country, this beautiful, colorful mosaic of America,
has changed once again. It's a different country than the two thousand and
six teen version of this country. And the second thing, which I think
is important is how has he expanded his base. He's become intolerable to a
very large group of people. And the Nicky Halley voter, when questioned about
the election, they say, oh, no, I could never vote for
Trump. Forty three percent of them said not going to support him in the
general election. Seventy percent of the New Hampshire people not support I voted for
Nicki Haley. He's not getting my vote. And so you need that crossover
vote after a primary. You need a healing process and a party, and
you need the crossover vote. Reagan got it from Bush, Hillary Clinton.
She did not get it from Bernie Sanders. Barack Obama did get it from
Hillary Clinton. So you know, we're here now not to see what happens.
But you know, do you think Biden gets re elected? I do,
yes, I think Biden gets re elected. And you know, sort
of weekend at Biden's. He's got one foot on a banana pel the other
foot in the casket. I mean, what am I going to do?
But I would choose him over Trump because he's not a threat to the institutions
of the democracy, not a threat to the rule of law, and we
all benefit from the predictability of our legal system, and we benefit from the
fact that nobody at the top has that much power. When Trump says he
wants to seize power, be a dictator and this sort of stuff, let's
take him seriously. We don't need people like that in our government. Now,
Anthony Trump, did, we talked about it earlier, make some statements
about CBDCs. I might get your thoughts in general, because there seems to
be a growing need for this in the United States, or a stable coin
version, maybe that's more decentralized, because other countries are building their CBDCs,
and if we want to maintain the US as dollar as a world reserve currency,
we may need to have this. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, you see, I actually think that you can have a stable coin
doesn't come with all the bells and whistles of privacy invasion, and why not
just go with the stable coin. Moreover, Jeremy A Layer just put out
a white paper describing the benefits of having a stable coin versus a central bank
digital currency. It's less threatening to the world to have a stable coin,
and in some ways it may maintain or improve the dollar supremacy. So you
know, I'm not buying that we need to have a central bank digital currency.
By the way, we'll survive if we get one, but I don't
think we will get one. There's still like libertarian elements in the country.
And I can just tell you that they were talking about dollarization over the blockchain
in twenty seventeen when I was in the White House. Now grant that I
was only there for a short period of time, but the Fed in July
of twenty seventeen produced the white paper talking about putting the dollar up on the
blockchain. Nothing happened. It's seven years later, so we'll see. But
I think the first move is going to probably be to use jeremilair at Circle
and the USDC. Yeah, and that makes sense because it's on different blockchains.
Is interoperability, Like you said, it's more decentralized. Less you know,
people will have less concern and could be interoperable with those governments. True,
in some ways that would be less threatening those governments. Finally, question,
here you have jerymail Air and Circle, they have USDC, you have
Tether in the open market, a globally the largest stable coin, and you
have companies here in the United States are launching stable coins like PayPal. What
do you think happens? It seems like a lot of stable coins they're gonna
be popping up here and there. I know regulations are needed, but what
do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, if they're regulated and
there's reserves behind them, just like we have a lot of banks, I
don't see how we wouldn't end up with a lot of stable coins. Now,
having said that, will these stable coins make themselves interoperable with each other?
And I'm hoping that's the case. I'm hoping that we get legislation that
creates that type of clarity. So if you have a stable coin back to
US dollar or an algoran and you need to flip it into an ethereum based
stable coin, I hope we were able to make that happen for people without
a lot of costs or a lot of fanfare. So you know, I
think it happens, and I think the future is bright. And if you're
at four percent adoption or four and a half percent adoption right now, Tony,
imagine what the world looks like at nine percent of adoption. Exciting times,
Anthony, thank you for joining me. Good to be here, man.
I like your rig, I like your backup back there. Thanks man,
I've been adding to it all right. Good luck, take care of
Anthony. What