Anthony Scaramucci: Gas prices could skyrocket by Christmas

I mean, I'm getting my ass fired from the White House. I'm getting it lit up by the late night comedians, excoriated in the press. He goes, "Hey, Dad, are you going to be okay?" Well, it was the first time in my life where my kid was trying to parent me.

Good to see you, too. I mean, yeah. You know, I just said if that book was about all my wrong moves, it would have been the size of a phone book. So, it was just about a historical analysis of how we got to where we are.

I'm on the planes a lot and I had two good research assistants that helped me with it. And, you know, I'm always asked the question when I'm traveling or speaking: What happened? How did we get so tribal, so partisan? How did such a large group of people in the United States feel left out? A group of people I grew up with, that you grew up with, that were economically aspirational as working-class people, how did they become desperational from an economic point of view? So I did about a year's worth of research, formulated a few ideas and put it down, and then obviously backed it up.

11 days more infamously. I don't know famously, but you've been steadily pushing back. You've sounded the alarm on what's going on in this country very early on.

Well, listen, I love the country. I say in the book, I made a mistake working for Donald Trump. I also objectively explain in the book what Donald Trump has done well. I try to tell people it's really not about left or right, but what's right or wrong for the country. And in this book, it is not a partisan book. It's not a witch hunt. It's just an observation, economic observation, political observation, but also a historical observation of what happened in the country to create the moment that we're in right now. And by the way, if you don't like this moment, the last two chapters are about how we can repair and how we can rebuild. But I sounded the alarm on President Trump in 2019 because I don't like the politics of hate. I don't like the politics of anger. People can criticize me for working for the president when he was ridiculing Mexicans before he got into the presidency. I have to own that. We have some cognitive dissonance in our personalities and we project onto other people what we want them to be as opposed to what they are. But at least I was man enough to admit my mistakes, and I admit a lot of my mistakes here. Okay, I thought some of the things that we did in those three catastrophic decisions, I probably would have supported all three of those at the time. So, this is a hindsight test. This is like, okay, hey, we thought this was going to happen. These are well-intentioned, good people trying to make a great decision on behalf of the American people. And the consequences being what they are, they went in a different direction than they originally anticipated.

I would say that the country's top-heavy. I would say that the dynamics in the country, and I know you talk to a lot of economists, the upper third of the country, certainly the upper 1% of the country, is doing incredibly well. Those are the owners of the stocks. The profitability for those large companies are quite good, and that is all well and good, and I'm all about that. But if you look at disposable income and you look at the median income in the country, you know, we're not catching up, and there's a lot of financial anxiety. It's a very large group of people that feel left out of the system. That's what I would say.

Okay. So, Brian, to fortify that, I'm on the board. Eric Schwarz, who's the head of the board, former Goldman partner, dear friend of mine, put me on the board of City Harvest this past year, which is a big honor for me, frankly, because I want to be helpful. It's the largest food bank in the city. The stats are very damning. We have 1.2 million people in this beautiful, very wealthy city that feel food insecure. By the way, these are not homeless people. These are people who have two jobs, working super hard, to your point about going to McDonald's. They're having a hard time because their energy prices are up, their heating prices are up. The transportation to get to and back to work is up. And it's starting to eat up the other aspects. Remember, these price increases and inflation are regressive. Wealthy people can handle it, but the poor can't. And so we have 1.2 million people that are food insecure in the city, likely to go up after the midterms because the SNAP benefits, one of the things in the big beautiful spending bill, is that the SNAP benefits are going to be reduced after the midterms. So, guys, that put a lot more pressure on these people. So you see it in the economic data, I see it. I'm doing well.

I think the Republicans have lost the economic narrative, and again, I want to be objective. I think the president, frankly, understood the crisis at the border, handled the border reasonably well. I don't like the fact that he shut off legal immigration. I think, as an economist, we need one and a half to two million people to come into the country to refortify the labor markets and also to help us with our intellectual capital. We always need a flow of smart people to come in. That's where you got Sergey Brin. That's where you got Elon Musk and some of these very incredible innovators and visionaries. We certainly want that in the country. But shutting the border down, I think, helps on narcotic trafficking, helps on sex trafficking. It probably reduces the oversupply of labor in some of those jobs. I think he certainly got that right. But if he had just stuck with the direction of where things were going in 2024, he didn't like admitting this, but the inflation numbers were going down, the economy was going up. We were starting to rebuild off of COVID. But I think the decisions to ratchet up the tariffs was a bad one. Moreover, it was illegal. And so we've had this push-pull, stop-start with the tariffs. Tariffs are a regressive tax on poor people. Second thing that he did, he promised he wouldn't go into a forever war, the prosecution of that war. You know, many people will take him at his word about the risk of Iran and so on and so forth. I'm just not so sure. We had a deal with Iran that got ripped up, the Iranian deal that President Obama put together, and we're now in a quagmire, and it's pushing prices up, fertilizer prices, which affect food, energy prices. We're about to go into the winter. We could have $7 gas, and by the time we get to Christmas and we don't solve this problem, we've depleted our strategic petroleum reserves here and in Europe. And so I think from an economic narrative point of view, these things are hurting us. Now, someone will push back and say, well, look at how robust the business cycle is at the top end and look at the spending cycle and AI and so forth and so on. I say yes, there's no question about that, but the average American has about $400 in savings. The average American is missing dental appointments. They won't go to the insurance adjuster if they have a fender bender. We have 40% of the students, again, this is sort of a statistic knowing what food insecurity is. 40% of the students in the elementary school, that would be K to the sixth grade, if they're going to a public school in the United States, 40% of them respond to the following question: Why aren't you doing well in school? They said, "Because I'm hungry. I'm going to school hungry. I can't concentrate." Now, whatever you think of Kathy Hochul, on that one issue, I applaud her because she restored what was taken away in federal funding for the public schools here in the state of New York. You know, Brian, we're a rich enough country. We don't have to have the kids going hungry going into the schools. So, there's a have-not thing going on right now that's creating a lot of anxiety.

Well, I think the mood in November 2024 is, "Haha, Trump is back. Mooch, you're an idiot. You thought Trump would be bad for us."

Haha. Yep. Great. Yeah. Haha. Haha. Mooch, you're such an idiot. You got this wrong.

And I think the mood now is more akin to what Gerry Baker said two days ago. I don't know if you know Gerry, WSJ.

He says he thinks he's getting a case of Trump derangement syndrome. He's a longtime Trump apologist, longtime supporter. He was also making the lesser of the two evils argument that Trump was the lesser of the two evils versus what the Democrats were offering. But I think he's now seeing the existential harm that the president's causing to the body politic. There's something else the president's doing which is very, very bad for middle and lower income people. It's the corruption. Because let me tell you how corruption works in somebody's mind. Corruption takes away hope. When you're Brian or Anthony growing up on Long Island and the families we grew up in, we had hope. And our parents looked around and said, "You're going to be somebody." But when you have that level of corruption going on inside of Washington, people look up and say, "Oh my god, there's a two-tiered system. Some people are getting treated more favorably than others. And guess what? I'm not in there." And this doesn't become a glass ceiling, Brian. It becomes a concrete ceiling for people. I said something last night. I was at Politics and Prose in DC promoting the book. I said, I just want you to just think about this. This country lives on hope. Okay? I had hope as a kid. You know, my parents had a tight budget. We were in the middle class. But you know what? I had hope that I was going to break out.

Okay? And Henry Ford, whatever his stupidity was on certain issues, he had one great line that I always repeat: If you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.

Okay? And when you take hope away from people and they think they can't, guess what happens? They start taking their careers. They start taking their lives in a different direction. And we have to have a hope restoration in the United States.

Well, you need reform. You know, you need to have some accountability for this egregiousness that's happening in Washington. You need reform. You need to end Citizens United. That has been a failed experiment. This unlimited amount of money going into the political system since January of 2010, when that Supreme Court decision was rendered, has been an abomination for the system. The whole legislative agenda over the 16 years is big food, big business, big pharma, tax cuts for the rich, corporate welfare, crony capitalism, don't break up obvious monopolies. That's not helping the country. So there's a lot of things we could do, okay, that are in the best interests of everybody, and that can make the system a lot fairer. But you know, Citizens United is creating a separate but equal democracy. So that's a big thing. Gerrymandering, look at what's going on now. You know, they used to gerrymander quietly. Now it's like an open arms race where they're trying to redistrict each other to gain an advantage. And I submit to my fellow Americans, are we in a real democracy if the politicians are picking the voters? I thought the voters were supposed to pick the politicians. So that's another thing that we could do to reform things. We got to get back to the Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush budgetary guardrails. I write about that in the book. We had the Bush administration, the first Bush, created with Dick Darman, his OMB director, a legislation called PAYGO, or pay-as-you-go legislation, and it put guardrails on the Congress. Bob Kerry voted for it. The Democrat Dick Gephardt voted for it, and it forced the Congress to make spending decisions pursuant to those guardrails. Moreover, if you wanted a tax cut, you had to find a spending cut. If you wanted an increase in social services, no problem, but you needed a corresponding...

Well, I mean, I know you just had Rick Reeder on the show. I'd be interested in his take on it. He's obviously somebody I respect enormously.

Eye-opener for him.

But I think when you analyze it, the higher rates to me are based on the energy supply shock. The higher rates to me are based on inflation expectation. And the higher rates, we had an expectation coming into 2026 that we were going to have a 75 basis point cut. People don't remember that now. But then the war starts in February, and we have a 25 basis point increase with likely another 25 basis point increase. So our expectation was minus 75. And so if you have 50 basis point increases, you're 1.25 off of what your expectation was, right? So it's surprising that prices aren't lower in the stock market, but they certainly are lower in the bond market if you look at the activity. But I submit to you that this is probably more energy shock related. If you could somehow resolve the war and you got the energy prices down, there's a lot of deflation coming in terms of innovation and AI and the technology that we're...

Not going to happen quickly enough.