Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Crypto Collapse, AI Job Apocalypse & The End of Dollar Dominance

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Welcome back to All Things Markets and today, Mike Novogratz and I are diving headfirst into a world where crypto gets punched in the face, AI threatens white-collar jobs, and global capital starts quietly packing its bags. I’m joined by Mike Novogratz to cut through the noise, call out the real risks, and talk honestly about where markets, money, and opportunity are heading next. Michael Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital. He was formerly a Partner and President of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Mr. Novogratz served on the New York Federal Reserve’s Investment Advisory Committee on Financial Markets from 2012 to 2015. He serves as the Chairman of The Bail Project and has made criminal justice reform a focus of his family’s foundation. Follow Anthony on X: https://x.com/Scaramucci Follow Novo on X: https://x.com/novogratz Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The reality is it's impossible to completely de-globalize, right? We've got a $25 trillion supply chain built in China. We need each other. But they send the message very clearly through tariffs, through hard trade negotiations, through ridicule and abuse. The rest of the world isn't saying, oh, great, thank you very much, sir. They're doing what they need to do to keep trade alive with the U.S. and they're pivoting elsewhere.

U.S. assets as a percentage of reserves are as low as they've been in five years. That's a one-way trend. We are losing our reserve currency status slowly. By design, Michael. Yeah, which is crazy. Welcome to All Things Markets. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And I'm Mike Novagrats.

All right, let's get into it, Michael. What the hell is going on, Mike Novagrats? Okay, I've been in a submarine out here on Long Island getting, you know, depth charges, crypto depth charges bombing me. Let's start with the crypto, if you don't mind. You said you're an expert in this. You heard a crypto winner, right? Yeah. Why, though? What caused crypto winter? We had in five days, kind of like the Arctic blast. Remember that thing that came over and they were like it was the Arctic bomb or the cold bomb? And we did winter all in about five days. And listen, 60K in Bitcoin is the 200 week moving average. That's kind of held in the other crypto winners. I think that's probably a tradable low. We probably saw, I mean, my lips to God's ears.

We probably saw, it doesn't mean we won't retest it, but we probably saw the low of this cycle. Why? Here's the big question is why. Often you never know till later, somebody sold a lot. And then, you know, I said this a few times on the podcast. I think after we broke a hundred to the upside, there was a bunch of frenzy. But, you know, we started seeing sellers of some of the big OG sold. We had the big seller. Friends of mine sold some.

And it was almost like a seller's vine. and then they used quantum as an excuse, quantum, quantum, quantum, to sell more. And then I think, you know, prices are set on the margin. We had more sellers than buyers and it created this cascade, a little bit synchronized with worries about the equity market, even though the equity market's barely off the highs. But there was that worry, you know, stocks had a bad week.

And there wasn't a lot of, line in the sand where people came and said, I got dry powder to buy. Listen, we had the world's best salesman already hawking Bitcoin and Larry Fink, right, biggest asset manager. You had President Trump. I actually think the president's involvement is, you know, from the administration, it's been great for crypto, but from the first family being as involved as they are, it's been negative.

You know, it could make it harder to pass this market structure bill. and just the sense of this is supposed to be kind of anti-government. Yeah, well, I mean, the Democrats from their X-Feed, they put out yikes, you know, and they linked crypto to Trump. So that's telling you that the Democrats want to be anti-crypto, I guess, or anything that's Trump, Trump for Democrats against. I could get to the group that are around the negotiating account, right? You only need a handful of Democrats to pass this. Bill. They don't want to, they want to go in unison so they have some cover, right? So they're 14 of them. They want at least 10 to cross. And they're getting a lot of shit from their left

flank. And on days like yesterday, the left flank, you know, licks their lips and says, I told you were right. This is all a fraud. It doesn't mean anything. Listen, the guys that are in the room from Corey Booker to Mark Warner, Chuck Schumer, Ruben Gallegos, you name them. They understand it. They understand the importance of getting it done for the U.S. financial sector for the U.S. economy and actually for political reasons. They want this off the table politically. And so I haven't given up hope.

I think there's still over a 50, 60 percent chance this gets done. But, you know, the president. is on a tear. And the more things he does that seem out of sync with what normal is, makes it harder for, you know, the centrist Democrats to tell their vocal, you know, compatriots, hey, no, shut up, right? Before we move on to agentic AI and the software issues, I just have this last question on crypto.

Anybody blown out? I mean, you're sitting at Galaxy, very large exchange. It feels like somebody got margin called, and we went from 87,000 seven trading days ago to 60,000, baboon. Or that didn't happen. Look, I used to have two hands. I lost a hand. I think people lost a lot of money if they were on crypto.

I have not. There are other parts of your body, Novigratz that you could have lost. Thank God it was just a hand. Let's just put it that way. I would say we've had all our clients, you know, meet their margin calls. And it's not been frantic. We talked to a few of our competitors that we have good relationships with. And they've had the same experience.

there's a ton of volume coming out of Abu Dhabi in the Mideast and there is speculation though absolutely not verified that you know there's a big seller I don't know if it's from Venezuela or where that's been selling and they've been selling through you know proxies in the Mideast that then sell through Binance. So Binance has been a huge portion of this volume. again, that's just speculation. And so we won't know if the selling is over for six months then, right?

Because it could still be another big leg of selling as far as we know. We don't know. I saw buyers yesterday for the first time. Okay. And, you know, not in huge size. You know, they came in. They bought, you know, 10 million, 15 million, 3 million. And so we're closer to the buy range than the sell range at this.

point. What worries me more isn't, will Bitcoin go back below 60,000? I don't think it will. I think we put a tradable bottom in. What worries me is that after beatdowns like this, there's a lot of volume in the last few days, and there's a little bit of volume for the next few days, and then volume slow. And people are like, oh, and so we bounce it. I don't know if we bounce this. 80 or, you know, between 70 and 80, and then we just kind of die for a while until, and then we're going to need something to reduce the thing. And so what could that be? Listen, Kevin Warsh is going to cut rates, but he's not in until June. Battle Hill. The market structure bill if it passes would help a lot.

But I'm guessing there's something I'm not thinking about that's going to get crypto going again. But my real base case is we go into a pretty quiet three to four months after we bounce and hit a new range. Volatility will die and volumes will die. And that's not great for the business. Right. But the long term narrative in your mind is not lost here, right? It's damaged but not lost. Listen, every four-year cycle, crypto gets kicked in the midsection and then poked in the eyes and then spat on and danced on.

And it resuscitates itself, you know, like Lazarus, it rises from the dead. Why? There are 250 million people around the world that have bought into this Bitcoin community. They're not going to just turn it off. Right. There's so much vested interest. People own crypto, they wanted to go higher. So they're going to figure out how do I regroup and rebuild narrative.

Now, there's never. been a leader. We've had, you know, little demigods within the crypto community from Brock Pierce at one point and, you know, CZ and Michael Saylor and, you know, Larry Fink to a degree. And so you'll see new new salesman plus old salesmen arise and they'll tell a similar story with their own twist and that will end up building momentum again. But it doesn't happen overnight. Like when Humpty Dumpty breaks, it takes a while to piece them back together. All right. Let's talk about something else that is potentially breaking. At least the market is worried about it. And that is the software engineering job for the human being, Michael.

We've learned that Claude Co-work has created a application or a artificial intelligence that will allow for full, software development, including reading files, organizing files, drafting documents, but full software development. They're calling it the SaaS apocalypse. What do you think about all that? Is that overblown? You know, I don't know. I don't think so. I was talking to one of the best investors in the world yesterday. Real simple guy and he, but literally just a beast. One of one of the, I'd say the five best investors the last 30 years. And, you know, he's long chips and power in other stocks and he's short software. And we were talking about what companies are safe.

And we brought up, he brought up Spotify. Well, Spotify's got a mode. And everyone uses Spotify. And he was like, how fast before chat, GPT? Hey, give me my 10 best songs. What are the songs played by? And download them on YouTube. And you're going to be able to, someone's going to figure out how to,

had a chat GPT Spotify or Grok or Claude Spotify and create a product that's not $12.99 a month, but is $3 a month. The destruction of businesses without moats is happening. And again, what's interesting is the bull case for stocks is also you get to use this stuff to cut your costs. Right? Goldman's cutting a thousand employees. a year out. Margins go up.

Borsha's going to cut rates and you've got much more profitable companies with less people, right? It all still points to a social engineering problem in that you need less workers. People with assets make more money. You know, inflation is interesting. I look back and the only time I've seen real inflation literally, since the 90s has been with the supply shock of COVID. All the money printing in QE1 and QE2 with Bernanke never created any inflation.

But it created asset inflation. And I think we're in that same environment. We're going to see consumer price inflation go lower. And because we're going to be able to deliver products and services cheaper and cheaper. And we're going to see asset price inflation continue. continue to go up. And so you could see a world where this just continues. And let's play Fed chair for a second because there's going to be lots of political pressure, Michael. You know, if Garyo Amadee is correct, that entry-level white-collar jobs, about half of them will be displaced in the next one to five

years. Those are affluent people. A lot of suburban housewives are going to be pissed off, Michael. And they're going to descend on Washington and their reps and they're going to descend on the politicians, put pressure on the Federal Reserve. Do you think there's going to be a political implication to all of this? Oh, it's going to be one of the big issues. I think it's going to be a bigger 28 issue than 26 issue because 26 is local. You know, it's Congress and the Senate and 28 is the big national issues. But it certainly is going to be the major issue in 28. And it might be one of the major issues in 26. Right. Again, I always think in New Jersey, you can't pump your own gas. Right. Every other state, you just get out.

You pump your gas. You get a cheaper, you know, the sell serve rate. Not in New Jersey. Full serve only. Right. Governments can enact laws to keep people employed. And you're going to see that. You're just definitely going to see that.

I saw there's, you can have driverless cars, but there's got to have a driver on them. And, you know, figuring out certainly the transitional employee, right, person who's losing his job because of new technology and doesn't have enough time to develop a new skill set. We'll call that the transitional employee. But the young, what does the young guy do? I was with my 23-year-old son last night and he's hoping to get a job to develop a new skill set. today, you know, working for this very cool architectural magazine, one of the only ones out there. And I was laughing. I was like, all right, and he's smart. And he is, sees around corners.

And I was like, I wonder if I can use chat GPT or Claude or whatever, whatever which one I want to use to analyze things as well as my son can. Right? Maybe not as well as my son because he's my son and he's a super strong. are, but probably better than the average kid, who doesn't have as much education or knowledge. And so even like jobs like that, the beat reporter, chat GPT, I just think it is going to be so easy to displace people that we're going to have to figure the social engineering of this out. And it's, you know, you hate to use the word UBI, but it's something.

We've always had UBI. We just don't call it that, right? we've got a social safety net, it's going to get to become a bigger and bigger issue. And how you do that with dignity, how you do that with incentive, how do you do that so you don't incentivize bad behavior and lazy behavior, it's a real challenge. I think it's causing liquidity to dry up, though. Am I wrong in saying that? Take a look at the risk off across all markets.

It's leveraged longs are drying up. The MAG 7 is getting hit. The SaaS stuff, as we just mentioned, getting hit. Yeah, but this week was the single largest disparity of winners and losers I've ever seen. Right. Software destroyed and old economy stuff exploded. There's still so much money on the sidelines that wants to be in the stock market. And so, you know, it felt like a bare market on, on, you know, what it was to tell you, Wednesday and Thursday.

How about this Wednesday when it felt the worst? The equal weighted S&P was at an all-time high. Like, we're at the highs of stocks with all this happening. With the chaos in D.C. And it is chaos, right? It could be strategy, you know, like, you know, Trump is a very unique character in the annals of history. And but it's chaos.

And so normally the markets don't like that. They're just looking through it all. Michael, any rotation that you're seeing, meaning, you know, yes, the equal weight it is up, but are we rotating? Small caps seem to be outperforming large caps right now. You know, some of the dividend payers are getting a defensive bid? Anthony, one of the simplest trades right now is short the NASDAQ and long, Tokyo, long Europe. Japan's booming, right?

They've got a reflation story going on there and it's booming. I just was there. I came back. I said, I got by some Japanese stocks I didn't, and they're up like 6%. And so for the first time in years, the last 12 months, rest of worlds outperform the U.S., I think that's going to continue, right? Like, we're becoming. Is that Trump related?

100%. Like, listen. Tell us why it's Trump related. Well, because he, and this is not criticizing me, even, this is what they said they wanted to do. We want to renationalize. de-globalize. The reality is it's impossible to completely de-globalize, right? We've got a $25 trillion supply chain built in China, like we need each other. But they send the message very clearly through tariffs, through hard trade negotiations, through ridicule and abuse that we think,

I mean, you don't send Howard Lutnik into as your negotiator if you want people to feel warm and fuzzy, right? He's a bulldog and he's tough as shit. And the rest of the world isn't saying, oh, great, thank you very much, sir. They're doing what they need to do to keep trade alive with the U.S. and they're pivoting elsewhere. And so you're seeing capital flows. Again, U.S. assets as a percentage of reserves are as low as they've been in five years. That's a one-way trend. we are losing our reserve currency status slowly. By design, Michael. Yeah, which is crazy.

In my mind, is crazy. Right. But I think what Bessett would argue and what Trump would argue is we're not really losing it because there's no pretender. China's a closed currency economy. Right. And I asked, I was just in Asia. I said, well, how far, how many years before China. could open their current account. 20. You know, not three, 20. And so you don't really have the

REMMMP as a potential reserve currency. And Europe, you know, in 1989, when I started at Goldman Sachs, the European GDP was roughly the same size as the U.S. and we're roughly double now. Like, they're not the dynamic engine that deserves to be the reserve currency. And so that's why the market went to gold and silver. And then, And they went to, and quite frankly, stocks is a reserve currency. Like, what is the reserve currency? How do we do trade, but how do we measure our wealth? And it's going to get, it's more and more challenging.

I mean, Ray Dalio, right, moved half his life to Abu Dhabi and he's big in gold and silver. I would argue that we saw the tradable high in gold and silver last week. Like, if you want to look at market tops, look at the NASDAQ in 99, look at micro strategy two years ago. Like, what do bubbles look like? they look like what we just had in silver. And you never get back to that high. And so it was an amazing place to have your money for 12 months, right? Same with gold.

Not so much anymore is my thesis. And so where do you put your money? Anthony, it is brutally hard to figure that out right now. Yeah. But I also think that everything that we're just saying, if you look out five years, there'll be way more productivity in the economy and likely more. GDP growth.

Yes. And so then the question is, how do you share that? That's going to be the big political question. And I think, quite frankly, the reserve currency is going to be equities. Okay. So tell me how that would work. I mean, I say that metaphorically, how you preserve your wealth, right? Like, what is wealth actually?

In some ways, it's how rich am I versus the community I'm in? Right. The richest guy in the street is the richest. guy if that's your whole block. Well, if you're, if you're Anthony Scaremucci and you live around the world and you know everybody, you're as rich as all those peers. But so I think it's going to literally be some weighted index of equities is how you're going to preserve your wealth. And that's going to be denominated in different currencies, right? We've got a lot less currency volatility than we do equity ball. And with the,

And this is where Ray Dalio would come in and say, well, hold on, wait a minute. And I was like, with the exception of political revolution, which we might get, right, where they come out with wealth taxes and all kinds of attacks on the money class, you're going to continue to see asset prices go higher, consumer price inflation stay lower, and the wealthy just do better and better. And so, again, that can't last forever, right? we'll see in the next election. I mean, the real tell will be in the 2028 presidential. Do the Democrats put up AOC or someone in the middle? It's Josh Shapiro versus AOC. In some ways, that's the debate you want to see.

The center of the Dems versus, because I don't think the Republicans have a chance. Again, and it's not even blaming the Republicans. The pendulum is going to swing left to right until there's a new story that unifies America. I mean, the polling numbers on the right are horrific right now. And that's partly because of Minneapolis, partly because of tariffs. But a lot of it has to do with the poor aren't getting any better off.

It's the same complaint that Biden got, K-shaped economy, right? Stock markets on the highs, unemployment's fine, even though we're starting to lose jobs in the last few numbers. You're just not feeling it if you're in the bottom half of the economy. I guess the big thing for people right now is there is a change happening. happening, Michael. And at the end of the day, what does that change mean to them? And so before I let you go, I want you to talk directly to those people. If you had smaller amounts of money, $100,000, $200,000, $50,000, and you have anxiety about your job, anxiety about the changes that are happening in the economy, in the overall markets, what would you do? And what would you do? And

are your recommendations? Yeah, it's a great question. The first thing I wouldn't do, and it's what everyone is doing, is YOLO, right? There's like a nihilism in that younger group of saying, let me play for the 10 to 1, the 100 to 1. Let me sports bet.

I'd ban sports betting for that group, even though it's great entertainment because it just each up your money. And I would probably end up, you know, buying some stocks that look relatively stable and cheap. I mean, in some ways, it's hard to beat the S&P

because it kind of gets you everything. And so buy some S&P futures or buy an index fund. It's not sexy, but I do think that is a decent way of preserving wealth over the long haul.

And it's not paying $2.20 and it's not... Like, crypto had an amazing chapter of wealth creation for people. I don't think crypto is dead by any stretch, but it's going to take a while for it to get and regain its momentum. Golden Silver had its move. I wouldn't advocate people being in gold and silver. And so right now, I kind of think you're at a global equity portfolio.

But if I put a dollar on the table, you'd put some money in Bitcoin or you wouldn't? I'd put some money in Bitcoin. I still have a bunch of my own money in Bitcoin. And I think on the long haul, it's going to be fine. But I wouldn't have 50% of my net worth in Bitcoin, right? I like the Niki a lot. I think you got a big, big year in the Niki. I like Alibaba's stock a lot.

China is the only one who can compete with the U.S. and in AI. And I think Alibaba is an easy proxy for that. And so I would have some S&P. I'd have some Niki. I'd have some Alibaba. But it's, in some ways, unfortunately, it's an equity long. I don't think fixed income gives you enough, given the, you know, the yields that they're offering to put a lot of money into it.

How many, how many bare markets have you been in my, I've counted 10 in my career. It's got to be roughly the same, right? Well, yeah, I'd be 94 bond market. I'll give you mine, 87, the 89 UAL, remember when UAL, the merger broke, market crashed then. 1992 Gulf War. We imploded before we rallied. 1994, the David Askin crisis. You had the Goldman Sachs King Commitman.

Yeah, I had a crisis in 92. Right. 94, you had the bond market crises, yeah. 98 long-term capital management. Right. 97 Asia crises, 98 long-term capital management. Dotcom bubble in 2000. Yeah.

And then you had at the World Trade. at the World Trade Center event at 2001. Yeah. It was 0708. 0708, which was, I think, probably the most brutal. Yeah. And so how do you handle the crashes psychologically? Exercise.

The problem is most people do less exercise and you need to do more. And I get, and I'm most people. So I just say exercise and I looked at my last week and I got like a half a workout I was traveling and you can always make excuses. Right. In some degree, you know, you don't, you don't bet more than you can lose and you don't tie your happiness to a number. Like I was an extremely happy guy when I was at flight school making $18,000 a year.

Less to worry about hanging out with my boys, flying shoppers, chasing girls, like life was good. and I literally made $18,000, $1,500 a month after tax. And so I really think one of the problems people have is say, especially, listen, below sustainability, it's a very different question. I don't want to demean that stress. Because if you're below whatever that level is, you need to sustain the lifestyle, that's a ton of stress.

But once you're above that, I think it's really dangerous to tie your happiness to some economic number. I got to be a millionaire. I got to be a billionaire. You got to try to win it something and stack wins. And so I think the way you survive the crises is, you know what? I'm still okay. I got a girlfriend that likes me, hopefully, or a wife that doesn't hate me.

I got kids that are always going to like you because they're your kids. I got good friends and you can be just as happy at a $1,500 a month as you can at it, you know. You know, it's funny because when I was a kid, I had no money and I was working for a big lawyer that had a lot of money, at least in my mind. And he said, the money doesn't really matter. I said, well, that's because you have the money. Yes.

Okay. And then he said, ah, you're going to get the money. You're going to realize you're going to want to cook some pasta and watch TV. And he was right, Mike. Yep. He was right. Well. Why is that, you think?

Because humans are humans, right? They like connection with another person. Right. That's really what it is. You feel better when someone likes the girl who stares at you or the kids run. Like the single greatest drug ever invented on the planet is having a three-year-old girl, especially, when you come home from work, come running in with sheer euphoria. Daddy's home! And just the happiest person in the universe.

Like, you can't bottle that up. Well, guess what? If you're rich, middle class or poor, it's that same drug. Right. Amen. Three-year-olds like their dads because they're three-year-olds and they like their dads. But I think it's a good lesson to end this podcast with that the ups and downs of the market are going to be here. We live in a cyclical economy.

We have a luter cycle. We live in a cyclical stock market. and you have to embrace the ups and downs and dollar cost average, you know, buy some stuff. I bought some Bitcoin yesterday. I'll be buying some Bitcoin over the next couple of weeks and just hang loose without getting overly locked into the numbers that are in your stock market, bond account or crypto account. All right. Well, thanks, my man.

It's good to see you. And have a great weekend. We've recorded this on Friday morning for those of you that are listening over the All good. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian standard of living, productivity and innovation.

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