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Joining us now is Anthony Scaramucci, the Mooch, who was, he's just reminded us, the very first guest on our podcast on the very day that we launched. Right.
Yeah, very proud. Four years ago.
Feel like I'm a good luck charm for you guys.
We are. We're blessed without you. The good news is that you're still here and we're still here. So something went right. And he's brought out a book called All the Wrong Moves.
Friendship. Unfortunately, you stuck with me.
I will not diss that. We will come on to some of the wrong moves. But I just want to stay with this whole question of crypto donations. If you were a crypto billionaire, why might you give to the Reform Party in the UK? What might you be thinking?
Well, I mean, it's a hedge. Let me talk very cynically for a second. If I was a crypto billionaire, I would not be giving money to Nigel Farage for many obvious reasons. But if I was more cynical, I would want to hedge myself. I'd want to have his support should he rise to the prime ministership or that party take power in some way. And so they're probably copying the playbook from America, the sort of post-Citizens United America where since January of 2010 when Justice Scalia rendered that decision, we're 9 to 1 on political donations into political action committees, candidates to support policies. You know, it's the reason why we have chlorinated chicken because they pay the money, right?
Chicken takes us back to another time, another decade. But you understand my point. Okay. So just to say the Citizens United, there was the Supreme Court judgment which meant that there were no limits on donations to political parties.
Yeah, just to say this is pay for play. It's a pay for play. Your First Amendment right to dump as much money as you'd like into a candidate or a policy.
So just go back to the thing that you skirted over. You said if I was a crypto billionaire, I wouldn't be giving money to Nigel Farage. Why not?
Dangerous guy. He has a form of nationalism that's pernicious. If you really study history, when countries move towards nationalism, it's usually a precursor to mass violence and war. And what we find is that we are way better together. But as we lose our living memory of war, you could read Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, or others, we go through cycles where our politicians don't remember the war or they weren't in the war and they don't remember why we have all of these great institutions that we set up after the war and that leads to long-term division. But if you're not thinking, if you're a crypto billionaire who's not thinking about the war and nationalism, but you are thinking he's just offered a 10% tax rate to crypto, then it does become a whole lot more attractive, right?
It does. But again, you got to be very careful about all that stuff because what's happening, same thing is happening in America, right? There's an oligarchy circling around the Trump administration and they're feeding the Trump administration and then they're getting back exactly what they want from the Trump administration in terms of tax breaks and corporate subsidies and corporate welfare and things like that. You know, the great irony is that socialism is okay if it goes to the wealthy. If it goes to the man on the street in America, it's not okay. So, but yes, if I'm super cynical and I want that 10% tax, even though the society is under duress from a healthcare perspective, social services and infrastructure perspective, if I'm that cynical, I want that. But I'm more in the Jensen Huang category from Nvidia, I'll pay the taxes, no problem. I'm a New York resident. I pay the highest taxes other than California in the country and I don't mind doing it.
Could I just ask you something else on the crypto front? Because I've heard the leaders of Reform going on the radio today talking about how with our tax regime for crypto that will bring a very important industry to the UK. And I'm thinking I can picture a car plant with thousands of people working on a production line and all the rest of it.
Yeah. If crypto is in the UK or crypto is in the Philippines or crypto is in wherever it happens to be, there's no industry that comes to Britain with it.
Is there though? Yeah, because you would pick up the tokenization, you'd pick up the transaction fees, it's the financial services economy. Think of sort of the growth that happened in the City of London after the Wall Street Big Bang.
You know, you had the Big Bang. It is beneficial. Is he right when he says they're giving to Britain because they see us on the verge of bankruptcy and they want to make it rich? I mean, is there an argument that legitimizing crypto and becoming more crypto friendly as a country would massively expand our growth?
Okay. So here's the problem. I think you know, remember I'm in the crypto industry. So what I would say to you is that there's some nefarious elements to the crypto industry that give the whole industry a bad rap. But if you really want to understand what's going on, we're going to move to 24/7 markets and the securities are actually going to be tokenized on the blockchain. So meaning you're going to trade stocks in the FTSE or the S&P 500 that are going to be linked and layered on the blockchain. So they'll have almost instantaneous transaction. As an example, if I go to sell my Bitcoin, it settles in a minute and then the money is wired from my Bitcoin broker into my JP Morgan account in less than 10 minutes. That doesn't happen on Wall Street. Doesn't happen in the City of London. And so that's...
So the whole bells, the whole like start the market, close the market is...
That would be gone. And you would have what's called perpetual trading. You'd also have lower fees for people and you would also provide billions of people outside of the UK and the United States in other markets that they don't have access to brokers the opportunity to participate in the capital markets. So if you're telling me that Great Britain wants to lead that, that's going to be very good for the financial services industry in Great Britain. But there are nefarious elements of the crypto industry that give it a bad name. But that's the part of the industry that I participate in and I see that future. So yes, it's not a car plant, but you'll have, you know, tens of thousands of people working in the United Kingdom, and they'll probably be working remotely, frankly, because they'll have that capability.
Yeah. And when you look at Great Britain and you look at us in terms of crypto, are we lagging behind everywhere else?
No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that your 60-year-olds in the country that are running the country from a financial and regulatory perspective don't want it because the banks don't want it. Because it's a threat to the banks. If I told you, you know, when I started on Wall Street in 1989, it was trade date plus 5 days. It's now trade date plus one day. What does that mean? If I buy a stock from Emily's account, it takes one day to settle before it arrives in my account. 37 years ago, it took 5 days to do that. If you want to tokenize that security, it'll take 10 minutes. And it'll also be done at a way lower cost. So, this would be tangent to what happened in long distance, right? When I was here in the 80s at the London School of Economics to call my parents, it was $3 a minute. I could talk to them for five minutes for $15 in 1985, which are worth more than today's dollars. Today I can log into any internet cafe and I can call them for no cost. And so that's what's happening.
I'm not sure when the last time you went to an internet cafe was.
All right. Well, I'm making the...
Yeah, but you could have a WhatsApp call or a Facebook WhatsApp call.
Okay. So what we haven't really talked about is the nefarious...
You're not that far behind which is good news for the UK. Listen, you know, listen, I don't know what happened with this whole non-dom thing. You know, I don't know where you guys stand on it and I don't want to opine on British politics because I'm not an expert, but what I generally find is when you're taxing super wealthy people, they have happy feet. They move around. You know, when they raise tax, I'll talk about America. When they raise taxes...
You mean they're leaving?
They leave. They leave. And so, give you an example. 2017, Trump cut the state and local income tax deduction. You know, New York City and the surrounding area lost 500,000 people over a 9-year period of time. And where did they migrate to? They went to Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, and they went to Florida.
Well, you've got a socialist mayor now in your... you've got Mandani. People aren't leaving in their droves now.
It's a separate topic. So, Mandani is actually doing a reasonably good job. Okay. As an objective person, Mandani is doing what Mario Cuomo would have liked him to do. He campaigned in poetry and he's governing in prose and so he's been very, very practical. The streets are clean. He gave Tish, who's the commissioner, kept her on. The crime rates are very low. He's filling the potholes. He's a very practical politician. And so he has a 68, 69% approval rate. I mean, he's like Mark Carney, you know? I mean, this guy is very popular and he deserves to be popular. And me as a New Yorker who did not support him because of the whole socialist rap, he's done a very good job of running things from the center.
So, let us just go back because you talked about the nefarious side to crypto and I guess why it's nefarious is because there is so little transparency. We don't see how the money changes hands. We can't trace it. It can work behind or subverting government policy and that is a big deal, right?
Okay, so let me push back on that because that's actually a misnomer and you can, if you go to Mike Morell, the former deputy to the CIA, you may remember Morell, he carried the briefing book on 9/11 for George W. Bush, he wrote a white paper three years ago trying to dispel that misnomer. You can totally track it. If I have your wallet address, I can probably get access to your crypto. And in more than one occasion, the FBI has found the quote-unquote ransom money by just tracking it. It's easier to track it than cash US dollars. So that's number one. That's the misnomer. But where I'm upset with the industry is what Trump did. Okay. So what Trump did was he created a memecoin which is completely worthless. It's effectively a gambling token and he rug-pulled his constituents. But then he also probably accepted money from foreigners through the coin.
What rug-pulled means he charged people money to buy.
Yeah. So he listed the coin at let's say $100. The $100 came in. He put it in his pocket and now the thing is traded down to $2 or a dollar, you know, it's down 99%. So he made about $800 million for himself and the constituents that bought the coin lost $3.8 billion. And he did that right out in the open. Okay. But also remember, if you're an American and you're concerned about foreign money entering politics, it's a way for tons of foreigners to influence the president. Moreover, this guy just, I mean, he's the shameless corruption artist because he threw like an event for crypto guys and said, 'Hey, if you put 100 million or 75 million into my memecoin or into World Liberty Financial, come have dinner with me in Virginia at my clubhouse, my golf clubhouse.' And he's dropped a lot of the cases through the SEC, right? So, he's dropped cases against Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken.
Okay. But some of those cases were nonsensical. That was a partisan witch hunt by Elizabeth Warren, who hates crypto. She's sort of tied into the American banking lobby. Remember, the banks don't want the crypto industry to succeed because if I'm offering you stablecoin yield and I have no fractional banking, that means I have reserves to back up your money. That's a safer bet for you than the way the banks operate, right? So, the banks don't want that. The banks have done everything they can to curtail crypto the same way the taxi cab guys tried to curtail Uber.
Can I just... you know it's going to eventually be accepted because the technology is...
Okay, but the point is if people are looking at this and saying there are crypto billionaires out there...
Suggest that the both of you don't show your age in this conversation. Okay. Because people that are north of a certain age are very negative on crypto.
Hey, your children, that's absolutely... your children are actually very positive on...
No. I was going to ask you a different question.
I'm older than both of you. So you better be respectful of this. Right. You better be respectful to me. I'm older than both of you by a lot. If you are looking at people who've got so much money that they can throw 36 million pounds at a party pretty much overnight, then there is a suggestion that something is odd in the world of crypto.
No, it's not just crypto. Come on, guys. The tech bros are just smarter at it. Okay, that's an open donation. You don't think these tech bros have given money? Look what Bezos did with Melania Trump with the $40 million going into the documentary. Okay, so come on. They're all doing it. And so what you want, if you really want to talk about real reform, you got to pass legislation to stop it from happening. Okay, the Citizens United and the US repealed the Volcker Act, which seemed to work, okay? Which prevented the money from coming into the politics. When the money goes into the politics like that, the middle, lower class, working-class people get destroyed because what happens? The legislative agenda is for big business, big pharma, big food, crypto, tax cuts for the rich and what's left for the little guy. And they get very, very cynical and you get more anger-based populism.
Just beforehand, you were saying about how Trump made $800 million from crypto and the people who invested in his crypto lost 3.8 billion dollars. This has gone on and you have seen all sorts of other plays with the Melania token and other things as well where money has come in and Trump seems to have got rich and everyone else has seemed to get poorer. How is it that he is still so popular in America with that base even though those are people probably the people who have invested and lost a whole ton of money?
Well, first of all, let's go over, he's not that popular, right? He only has a 33% approval rate.
I guess the question, John, is how is it still, how is this possible? He still has a 33% approval rate.
