Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Iran Regime Change, Greenland Takeover, Open AI vs Anthropic, Money in Politics

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Welcome back to All Things Markets—Michael Novogratz and I are diving deep into the money in politics, the crypto legislation battle unfolding on Capitol Hill, and why the banking lobby might be winning fights it shouldn't. Novo has just returned from Washington with some sobering insights about Citizens United, lobbying power, and why the smart money is betting big on digital assets despite the headwinds. 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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Conditions apply. Since Citizens United, this was a court case that allowed for unlimited money. to go into issues or potential candidacies, lobbying has become way more powerful, and these congressional leaders more or less do the bidding of the lobbyists that usually get their way if there's a lot of force put on them. Do I have that wrong? It is. It's sad and bad for our country and bad for democracy that money talks as much as it does. And period in the story, you know, you just see it in every part of our political system. And so, yeah, and the banks have a lot of it. Welcome to all things markets. I am Anthony Scaramucci. And I'm Mike Novagrats. All right. So Mike Novagrats,

last time we spoke, you were on your way to D.C. The Senate Banking Committee has postponed its vote on the crypto market structure legislation. There's been some industry pushback. Why don't you take us up to speed on what you learned in Washington? And I know you're still an optimist that the bill gets passed. So let's start there. Yeah. So let's start. with the good news. The good news is on the Democratic side from the minority leader Schumer

all the way down, there is a commitment to get this done. People actually want to get this done. And they want to do it for two reasons. A, they think it's important for America to lead in digital assets. But maybe more importantly, B, they realized

it was really bad politics to be anti-crypto, and so they want to be seen as being pro-crypto. And they want to get this off the table going into the midterms in the 28 elections, right? Pass this bill and there's no real legislation left in the crypto space. And so I think there is good faith. And I think they've been negotiating in good faith. And I think the Republican side, same thing,

though a little frustration of how long this is taking. And then what I would tell you is it's a really complicated set of issues. Like if me and you were writing the bill, guys who are pretty good at crypto, we'd have a hard time theory on every issue. And now you match that with the fact that our industry isn't an industry, it's a group of fragmented people with their own ideas. and, you know, whoever spends the most lobbying seems to have the strongest voice. You know, Brian Armstrong, there's 21 lobbyists on his team in D.C.

They have been all over the hill for a long period of time and deserve a lot of credit for getting a lot of this stuff hashed out. They've been loud and vocal about interest on stable coins. I think we're going to lose that battle as an industry it's a shame. It just tells you how strong the bank lobby is.

And there'll be a compromise. The compromises the stable coin companies will be able to give some reward points out for usage, but not balances. And you think people like the Coinbase team will accept something like that, Michael? I don't want to speak for Brian or Coinbase. My gut feeling is when you look at the bill in whole,

it is so good for the industry to move on. You'll do that. And then you'll come back and try to fight that in round two a couple years later. Yeah, I mean, I think that the enemy of progress is to search for perfection. As you and I both know as entrepreneurs, you've got to get things going and then tweak them as you go. But let's go to this issue because we've got a lot of young viewers. Fractional banking is such that I make a deposit. And then the bank uses my money in lots of different ways, including loaning it to potential mortgages or commercial, real estate.

estate or it could be a business loan to somebody and they take a spread. They pay me interest and they charge interests on the loan and there's a spread there because the way fractional banking works is a little bit of a multiplier effect to those deposits. That's not true in the stable coin industry. Is that correct? Let's be careful. So yes, you're right. So if I was the Fed share and I thought I'm going to have deposit flight and it's all going to go to stable coins. and there's no credit creation mechanism on the other side, I'd be scared. What's interesting is the blockchain world, the crypto world, is quickly coming up with credit solutions, right?

We've tokenized the CLO recently. Mike Cagney's got a whole company, right? That's tokenizing mortgages. you know, there is a big and growing defy credit business that we're participating in Galaxy all the time and that's kind of one I see the big growth industry. So I think in time, in three, four, five years, you're going to be able to keep stable coins in your wallet. You're going to be able to actually lend out money to small businesses, to large businesses,

to mortgages in tokenized form. And so I do think that transition will happen. And it was interesting. A few senators were really excited when we were explaining so what was happening in D5 credit. So that's one thing that you'll have, you will have credit creation. The second thing is, listen, they are already, so they're worried about deposits. Why? Because J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citibank, on your savings account, pay you nothing.

they pay you less than 10 basis points. And so your desire to hold money and savings, most of it's laziness. You don't want to keep your money somewhere safe. You're not really paying attention. There are places, I mean, Galaxy, one, will take your money at FDIC insured 4%. SoFi does.

There's a ton of neobanks where people can move their money, and they have it. So this idea that we're going to see this crazy amount of deposit plate into stable coins from U.S. customers is a smoke screen. The banks are using, the big banks are using the small regional community banks as their weapon.

It's like, oh, you're going to ruin the community banks. I'd say the same thing. If people want to take their money out of community banks and put it into a neobank, they already would have. Like, these are your least sophisticated investors. Over time, yes, an interest-bearing stable coin is a better instrument for the consumer than having your money in a bank that might or might not be insured by the garbage, right?

I know my stable coin is fully backed by the Treasury bill, right? So it's not a loose idea that maybe they're going to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. And so it's ironic that the Democrats and the Republicans are kind of fighting on behalf of the banks on this issue as opposed to the consumer. And some of that. I mean, I'm going to make a statement and they either agree or disagree. Since Citizens United, this was a court case that allowed for unlimited money to go into issues or potential candidacies. Lobbying has become way more powerful. And these congressional leaders more or less do the bidding of the lobbyists.

They usually get their way if there's a lot of force put on them. Do I have that wrong? It is. It's sad and bad for our country and bad for democracy that. money talks as much as it does. And period in the story, you know, you just see it in every part of our political system today. And so, yeah, and the banks have a lot of it. So, but there's got to be, you know, this has got to be a filibuster proof vote, Mike.

So we're talking about 60 votes. You think in the Senate, there's 60 votes. So there's a group of moderate Democrats that. have been really the team, right? The 12 of them that have been pushing this thing for it, and they're holding hands. They're like, we're all going to go or not going to go. And I think, who knows if that's the case when it comes to the vote,

but there are enough that will go that we'll get this built on. I feel pretty strongly about that. Now, listen, that's, you know, that's not the only issue. One of the issues, which I think they have solved is the ethics issue, right? Should the president or the vice president be able to launch a stable? launched their own stable coin or launched their own Meme coin or launched their own, you know, L1 blockchain while they're in office, should their children. And I think, you know, that's a really emotional issue right now. A guy's like Adam Schiff, that's been his big issue. And it's a lot of,

you know, this is just realpolitik. Think of it. You're a centrist, Democratic, senator, a moderate, but you know you've got a wing on the left, led by Elizabeth Warren and Coe, who's saying, what the hell is happening in America between ICE and accounts in Qatar and taking back Greenland it feels like chaos and doing anything to appease

the president feels counterintuitive to them and therefore that's going to be and I think it was a Ruma Gayego is on the Democratic side negotiating that with Cynthia Lummis. I think they're going to get there to something that's fair language where they both

to live with. but it's funny there's seven parts of this bill and each of them have to kind of get tweaked what I told all the senators both sides that I was meeting with and I think I met with 12 senators one on one over two days

and it had a lot of calls is I'm positive if I took the bill as is and the bill that we want you know in four years time and gave you both you wouldn't remember which one you voted on and it won't matter as much for the industry as we think, because we're such a young industry.

We don't know exactly what's going to happen. We don't know where stable. My real bias is 75% of stable coin growth is going to all happen overseas. Right. And so I would love new issue of a stable coin to be able to compete. Right now, Taylor has a monopoly almost because they were a good product. They were first to market. They have product market fit.

And they're making all the spread. You're looking at the foreign company take all the spread off your stable coin, a United States stable coin. That's so counterintuitive to me. I can't, I can't like see straight. Yeah, it just seems odd that we would get to a conclusion like that. But even with that conclusion, your prediction is we're going to get this deal done. Is that a first quarter deal?

Is it the end of February deal? I think we'll know a lot more in two weeks. Yeah. This has to happen in the next month or something. so where it will get done. And so there's a tremendous amount of to and fro going, you know, back on the wires every day. But like I said, there's a commitment almost, at least an emotional one on both sides to get this done. Let's go back to an earlier conversation that you and I were having related to the Fed.

the greatest reality television producer in the world is a guy named Donald J. Trump. He also happens to be the 47th president. And so he set up the apprentice and he's got people thinking one way and he just shifted it another way. He's now going to, yeah, I mean, he's got everybody listening. You know, I mean, he had Kevin Hassett as the favorite. He's got knocked down in the CalCe-Poly markets now. He said he would like him to stay. he's raised up Rick Reeder, a mutual friend of yours and mine, Kevin Warsh.

I think you know him better than I do, but I've met Kevin a few times. So what happens now in the Federal Reserve chairman's sweepstinks? You know, it's a great question. Listen, if you're a betting man, now, Worse feels like he's the insider. Right. We know he's close with Bessons. We're both mentored by Stan Drucker, quite frankly, Warsh's office, it's in Drucker. You know, he works at Drucker Miller.

And for the viewers that don't know Stan Druckamiller, he's kind of God when it comes to macroeconomics. He literally is the most respected or one of the most. But also 10 years ago, he was out there going to colleges. This is Stan Drucken Miller with the help of Kevin Moore. She was going out there saying, hey, there's a generational theft going on. It's called a barring too much money. The idea was, can you actually show young people how bad they're being. being screwed and have them become a political voice.

And unfortunately, young people... The answer that was no, Michael. No, they didn't get... Young people come and go when it, you know, it's like you need a lightning bolt that, that like, Mandami got the lightning bolt and got them all engaged right now. Obama had done it briefly. But, you know, when you're in your 20s, you care about finding your mate, you know, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your future white, you find about getting your job, starting to build your grub stake of money so you have shit to do.

like politics is not where you spend your time. When you're my age and your age, you go home, you say hi to your wife, you go on to, you turn on the news or you pick up the paper, you go under Twitter or X, you just drive yourself crazy with politics. But when you're 26, you're like, where are we going tonight? Right, right, where are we going tonight? Can you believe they took that much out of my paycheck? I was a liberal, but I'm now thinking of voting a Republican.

But, but, my, what does that mean, though, is, you know, because, you know, we talked about this last week. He's criminally investigating Jerome Powell. I think that's sending a message to people. I think worse in the short run would be seen as a more conservative pick who has a ton of integrity. Like when you meet Kevin,

I see Kevin as a monitor as though, Mike. Let me just stipulate this. I've heard him speak. I've read his papers. He's a hard dollar sort of a person. I don't see as a guy that's going to jam rates down to zero, hasn't changed his rhetoric? Let's assume, again, me and you are the two central bank heads, and we have to take a serum that makes us apolitical.

We are literally just going to do what we can. We're going to try to predict where inflation is going, and how do we hit the dual mandate of that? Like, we're the AI version of the perfect Fed governor. It's a really, really hard debate on where inflation is going. because you've got AI, which could be the greatest productivity builder in the history of the universe. And I think Kevin Warsh believes inflation's going lower and fed funds are too high. So I think in this period, his monetary view could align with what Trump wants, even if it's not for the same reason.

Okay. So, but, you know, listen, you could be in a situation where Kevin's position from his principles and his philosophical belief about how the Fed should operate could differ from President Trump. And then what, Mike? One thing we learned from Scott Besson, because I would have said the same things about Scott, as I said about worse going in, is when you're working for Trump, you learn really quickly he's the boss. And you don't take that job unless you're willing to bend some of your credibility, some of your reputation being that job. It's a deal with the devil.

It just is. And I think Rick Reeder and Worse are probably probably have already made that deal. You can justify, you guys say, well, wait a minute, the Fed has independence. So once I get in there, I can stand upish. I don't think you take that job unless you're, and listen, we've seen this. You know, Scott Besson has become eight times more political than I ever thought he'd become.

And he's good at it from that respect. I don't love what he, everything he says and stands for. Yeah, Larry, listen. I mean, you got to play the fiddle. I couldn't play it. I got fired after 11 days. Elon Musk figured out. He lasted 11.8 scaramucci's.

We like Elon on this program, so we round up to 12 scaramuchis. But, you know, at the end of the day, you're not towing that line perfectly, you know, and you're not, and you're playing to an audience of one. so it'll be interesting how that plays out. So we got two more topics to talk about. I want to go to Iran and I want to go to Greenland contemporaneously because I think they're somewhat similar. You know, I almost tweeted something on Iran this morning. I got the New York Post right here.

I read it every day. And it's like the kill switch and it's showing the pictures. And it's, you know, Iran's threatening to start killing all these people again. And he says if Trump comes in, it'll be catastrophic war. And I was like, sorry. I was in Iran in 2011. I took the U.S. wrestling team there. And, you know, I don't.

You visit a place. You get friends there. You meet it. You really start feeling more vested in it. And I have hated the theocracy a lot since. I mean, I hated it beforehand, but I've really hated it since then. And, you know, these guys are shithets, pure and simple. And they are, they are, do whatever they can to stay in power.

They have a religious zealotry. So they think whatever they do is justified. They're anti-woman. They're anti-progress. And their people are suffering. This revolution is not happening because guys like me wanted to happen or even that Donald Trump hate crime rent. It's happening because the group of people in charge of that country, the storage of that country, have blown it. They have hyperinflation.

Their currency has worth toilet paper at this point, right? If you're a merchant, you spent your whole life and you get hyperinflation. Now you're like, what have I? What are my savings? I can't send my kids to school. And remember, the broad Iranian middle class and business class are smart, commercial, well-educated. And they're like, what the hell are? Our country's going to hell in a handpass.

And so the revolution happened because of the Kurds. Let's make no bones about it. And when we talk about Bitcoin and gold, when stewards of their countries, currency do a shit job, this is what happened. Sometimes it happens. It takes longer than you think it's going to happen. But I was going to tweet, I was like, the decision to intervene or not intervene is such a hard decision as the president, as a political body. Like, it's a domestic thing.

It's happening locally, but you've got a group that doesn't have guns. You saw all these beautiful women and young men killed or maimed because they're out there. fighting with their fist and their hearts. And, you know, the other guys are using truck and lethal weapons. And, you know, especially at a time when we're taking what looks like a militarized police force in ICE and having that same debate in Minneapolis. You know, the poor lady with the whistle who gets shot in the face who was protesting, you can look at that as a tiny microcosm of what's happening in Iran and say,

Well, like, you know, I don't know it. It makes it even more confusing. I still deep down hope Trump does something. And I don't know what I would do if I was president before. It's a hard decision. So I give him in that whole administration the benefit of the doubt that it is a hard decision. I deep down hope we do something because I really dislike those. I want to ask the question in the following way.

I want you to think about it this way. Iran and Greenland are similar to me because of compromise. And so if the regime would be willing to compromise and set up the forces of economic reform and entrepreneurship and a move towards modernity, they might be able to survive. Look at what the Saudis have done. You can drive a car in Saudi Arabia. I know Western women. Let's be very, very clear. MBS was a 34-year-old, 33-year-old ascendant prince, right, who had a radically different idea what Saudi could be.

He is a unbelievable revolutionary, and this is going to sound like crasselman. If it wasn't for the Khashoggi incident, which is a big incident, that guy would be getting the Nobel Peace Prize right now for what he's doing. There is nothing in the DNA of Pomeini or any of the people around him that thinks like that. So the idea that we're going to left this administration pivot a teeny bit is just fantasy thinking. is they're not going to compromise. What about President Trump? Will he compromise on Greenland?

Greenland is such a bizarrely weird and idiotic idea. I mean, you know, I think Tom Tillis said it best. It was like, let's just stop talking stupid. I don't think the U.S. Senate and the U.S. the Republican U.S. Senate and the Republican U.S. House will go along with Green. It's just so anti what we. stand for as Americans. And I think J.D. Vance has blown his career to shreds between his response to Minneapolis and this whole Greenland thing.

Like, Trump can get away with shit like that. No one else can. And so I would literally take any bet that J.D. Vance doesn't be. And if you notice, Rubio's trying to stay out of the picture. No talk shows, no nothing, right? Because he knows it's too deep. It's a losing issue. And you've turned Canada and Europe against us.

Like, even if Trump's just negotiating, we. played our hand too far. Like, we don't need green. We've got bases in green. Like, this is, you know, listen, you can diagnose any politician and you can diagnose Trump with some sense of grandiosity or narcissic personality or what do you want to say. I just asked for someone else's Nobel Prize. This behavior is accelerating.

But he took it, though, Mike. He took it. Not only did he ask for, but he took it. He could have said, hey, thanks for offering it. But, you know, I'm not going to take it. So he took it. Because he's on a role in his mind. And to be fair, he's on a role. He's done some really interesting and great things for the country, as well as he's done things that have really, I think, damaged our country, maybe for a long period of time. Right. But you got to give him credit for the wins he has. He's got an economy that's still pretty strong, the stock market at the high. Not in gold terms, I would argue, but in general, in notional terms. And so he feels good. And he feels like, I mean, He said it in that New York Times interview. The only limit to my own power is my own morale.

I thought he said mortality. He actually said morality. It's really scared. We got a few minutes left. I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions. Okay. Open AI. There's a lawsuit brewing there.

Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman. He helped to get that business started. He thought it was going to be a non-per-profit. They converted it to for-profit. I feel like it's underreported. And when I read about it, I feel like Elon may have a compelling case. Am I wrong in thinking that?

You know, I would think that Open AI, if we are sitting here in six months with the stock market 25% lower and saying, how do we all miss that? It's going to be because Open AI had real trouble. There is so much of this financing circularity built around Sam. And he's not a guy everyone cheers for, right? to start with. And so, you know, there's a lot of internal turnover and dysfunction at that place.

That said, he was out first. He's still the biggest. And in this game, Anthony, I mean, everyone's talking about Anthropic all of a sudden. Anthropics doing a funding round. It's over-subscribed. It's hard to get into their coding. stuff is, you know, their enterprise stuff, everyone's loving. It's all, you know, I'm not smart if I don't think you're smart. I don't think anyone's smart up to know, is it going to be Gemini.

It's going to be, but I do know one thing. It's not going to be all of them. And the one that would hurt most of the market getting punched in the gut is Open AI. And so in some ways, we got to hope this thing doesn't happen for a while. That Open AI keeps, stays in the game. I don't think anyone's going to fall out of the game in the next year. There's just too much at stake, so it's easy for them to raise funds. But I don't know. This is the question to sort as an equity investor. And the products are getting better, Mike.

Every time I log into these products at Tesla, they're getting more robust. They're getting more colorful. They're self-teaching. You know, you can ask questions now. You feel like you're getting a really smart person responding back to you. in terms of the quality of the answers. And that's going to be a big increase in productivity. 12 months from now, you're literally going to use more and more AI doctors.

Yeah, concierge medicine. So, Mike, we're bullish on crypto then? This would be a big thing, yeah? If that bill passed, is this going to open the way for banks to be in this space? So other than last night with this, oh, my God, more tariffs on Europe. you know, Canada, making a deal with China. So we got risk off and crypto went down some. Crypto has been trading better this year.

It's broad-based Eki-F participation, i.e. retail. We know Wall Street's moving into crypto. And so I'm bullish on crypto. Again, I caution that I will get, you know, a Wolf of Wall Street bulletin, I'm counting on my chest until we take out 100, 1004 and stay there for a week or two. That was a big level that broke. So technically Bitcoin still is in this consolidation phase.

And we might be there for the next few months or longer. And so I got a core long position for the firm full disclosure. I will get, you know, both fists pumping until we take out that 100,004. All right. Well, I mean, that's the show for this week. We'll be back next Monday with hopefully crypto enthusiasm and lots of things to talk about. related to all things markets. Thank you guys for joining us.