Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Jensen Huang Slams AI Layoffs, Markets Go Haywire & the Great Tax Migration

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Markets are whipping around like a yo-yo with war, oil, and rates all over the place, and somehow stocks are still standing. At the same time, Jensen Huang is calling out CEOs for hiding behind AI to justify layoffs, while we’re watching a real migration of wealth out of high-tax blue states into places like Miami and Texas. So the big question is: are we managing this economy the right way, or are we just riding momentum until something breaks? Mike Novogratz and I discuss it all on All Things Markets. 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. Learn more about Galaxy here: https://www.galaxy.com/ 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 SALT here: https://www.salt.org/ Pre-order my next book, All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump, out on the 17th of September in the UK and the 22nd of September in the US: ⁠https://linktr.ee/anthonyscaramucci Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Part of a company's responsibility is to its employees. It's to its shareholders. It's to its employees. It's to the community it operates in. And it's to its customers. We've gotten so far away from that where it's shareholder, shareholder. Look at the money that meta made last year. Threattaking amount of money, but it's never good enough.

And in some ways, that's what makes our stock market go up, up, but at one point, with Zuckerberg were $250 billion, I guess he's mad that Musk is worth $800 billion. But we've lost this idea of responsibility to employees. But how you balance that with taking care of your employees is a really complicated. But we're not doing it well in the U.S. Welcome to All Things Markets. I am Anthony Scaramucci. And online Novagrats.

Michael, lots of stuff going on, Michael. And a little bit of, I don't know, I mean, you tell me. who's trade in the market, Michael? Which administration official trades the market? Because we're going to bomb everything, and then we're not going to bomb everything, and the markets are moving thousand points at a time. But tell me what you think is really going on, Michael.

We've had things. Treasury bond yields jump 28% in one day, doubling since January. Rising bond market volatility. Gold trades like Bitcoin now in terms of its volatility, Michael. Cautiously optimistic for it, yes. And so if that doesn't, happen, then you think we're going to lay down? And then the secondary question is, how the hell have we stayed where we are, given everything that's going on from a volatility perspective?

So what's interesting is the only market that in large ways was unscathed from this monstrous moving oil, monstrous moving rates is the S&P and the U.S. equity market. Like, if you had said, oh, my good, goodness, oil's going up to 100 bucks. Brent's going 110. Rates are 50 basis points higher in yield. Where do you think stocks are? It would be 10 to 15 percent lower and they were 4 percent lower. People had hedges in the S&P. There was a lot of gamma. People believe the stock market's going to look through it. Other stock markets, Korea got waxed, Japan got waxed, gold got waxed, silver got waxed. So places where people had a lot of risk got waxed. But the S&P was miraculous.

So I was talking to two great traders this morning, big investors, and they were like, I can't tell if that just shows how strong it is or it's the last one to fall. And I think everyone's having that same conversation. I think the reality is what is leading the U.S. market. I think companies like Dividea is an unbelievable earnings machine. And this war and this spike in energy doesn't hurt them as much as it hurts other people. And so maybe because U.S. large cap growth stocks are the driver that's keeping things up. I don't, you know.

But it's, it was the one thing that has confused every macro trader and an equity investor, really, is how well stocks have traded through this damn war. Let's flip over to oil, though. Goldman Sachs just raised its Brent crude forecast to $110 on average for the March-April timeframe. But how do you price that asset now? You know, Donald Trump is a one-man volatility machine. Are we trading oil? Are we trading his social media feed? Or what would you do given tonight he could say, all right, we're going to start bombing again? or tomorrow we'll flip the switch back to bombing. I mean, how do you trade something like that? It's very difficult.

It's very difficult. Two podcasts ago, I said when you start having these kind of correlated risk unwinds because there's an event, your best bet is to get to completely cash and then just interday, you know, buy the oversold and sell the overbought. I wish I had done that. I hope someone on this podcast listened to me and did it because it's, been a pretty good place to be. It's very difficult to have core positions, large ones, with that kind of volatility. And, you know, we've never had a president that uses social media

to put out big proclamations, right? It's the true social feed. And next thing you know, the market's up 3%. Michael, when we talk about closing the trade of Hormuz, when you and I were kids, we were like, okay, that would be a disaster. Can't close the trade of Hormuz. Now we've experienced a partial closing of the straight-ahor moves, right? Because the tankers are getting in that are yuan-denominated. Stuff is still going to China. And the president, thankfully, hasn't bombed any of those tankers because that would obviously lead to an even bigger escalation of a war that nobody wants.

But is there now a war premium or a structural repricing of energy that persists even after the ceasefire? on the notion that this straight is easier to close than perhaps the markets have been factoring in over the last 50 or 60 years? I think probably yes. And a lot will depend on, you know, what's negotiated. I also think I ran in the short run was very astute. But in the long run, you can only bluff people about the straight of Hermuz once. and now that people know that they can close it and will close it, I think you're going to see a massive infrastructure build in pipelines, maybe even a damn canal. You know,

like people are going to figure out a way to live without the straight Hermuz. It's not going to be done in 18 months, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Saudi and UAE are making plans to be Hormuz-free. And they, You know, you ever see them build islands in the Gulf? They will, I'm guessing they will, will try to neutralize that at one point.

Well, the Saudis have a pipeline. Obviously, they built it in 1981. They're starting to use it, but it's just not going to deliver the capacity that you could get through the straight. Could you see a scenario, though? I mean, and this is good for Russia, by the way. Let me just point out that the Russians like this because it's taking the heat off of them and the Ukrainian War. And it's also giving them more dough because we've relaxed some of our sanctions and the oil prices are a lot higher. And this ties into the Fed.

So it's a scenario where the prices are just higher and the notion that we were talking about with Kevin Warsh even a month ago is not possible where we can't get a rate cut coming into Warsh's new job. Yeah, listen, I think you are going to get some pass to inflation. Right? Food prices are going up. Lots of things are going up in the short run. Most U.S. central bankers will look at that and say that's a one-off and it's going to be transient and look through it. Does it have Warsh pause the first meeting? I was pretty convinced he was going to get it in cut rates once just to his nod to Donald Trump and that he thought rates should be lower. now he's going to have to convince the rest of the board that that's the right move. And maybe he takes the first meeting or the first two meetings before he starts that process. But Anthony, we're losing jobs.

Supply shocks in the long run are demand destructive. And so you raise rates to slow demand. And I don't think that demand is going to be the problem. Right. And so I think you probably still see rate cuts by the end of the end. the year in the U.S. And you probably see them in Europe, too, even though you're pricing a lot of hikes. I want to shift gears abruptly and talk a little bit about tax policy because you made

some comments on this podcast related to Democratic state officials and urging them to take it a little easy on taxes because you're getting massive migration. And so Wall Street Journal may have heard you say that. this, Michael, because they had a pretty intense article, macro article about red states are focused on cutting, eliminating income tax. Florida is now working on potentially eliminating property taxes. Four of the five richest people in the world now live on the Miami coastline. Tell me about this, and you're a New Yorker and I'm a New Yorker. I mean, I've been here my whole life. You've been here for most of yours. And I know you love this city and I love the city. But a lot of

our friends are leaving, Michael. So give me the scenario. What is it that the Democrats do not get about taxation and happy feet for wealthy people? Yeah, listen, the inequality story is so powerful for the left. So powerful for America to start with, right? We really do have, it's not the fake inequality. You know, we have not seen inequality like this in our lifetimes. and so that story is so infectious. And they say, well, we got to redistribute. And they're taking the stance that since it's not getting done at the federal level, let's do it here at the state and city level because that's all we can do.

And it's a mistake. It is a mistake. And in a world where the capital is as mobile, I think, you know, you can see. You can see the migration to places like. Lake Texas, Nashville. And Nashville's a Boondown. And they're not just lower taxes. There's less restrictions on building property.

They're so, you know, rents are down in Austin and they're up in New York. And that's with the migration. Rents are down in Nashville and they're up in New York because they're much freer in business, you know, ethos to build. spec housing. And so I think it's a big deal. But I don't think it's going away because the majority of the people aren't doing well. And so it's pretty easy to say, let's raise taxes and have a lot of people vote for you. I'm really worried that the Democratic Party, because

the revulsion of what's gone on in this administration with ICE, with this war, with the oligarchy, right? If it's Elon or you name them with the massive, you know, fortunes, with the government contracts, going to the friends, all of this stuff is really feeding and fueling that populace left. And I really do think 26 and 28, there's going to be a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. Is it going to be populist left with AOC and Bernie?

or are we going to come back to the Josh Shapiro's and West Moors and Greshon Wittmers and Andy Bershears and Pete Buttigenses of the world? And I sure hope it's the second because I think that could win in a general. And it would also provide a better foundation for kind of fair growth in America. But there's a good, good chance that when the right does so poorly, we're going to pivot all the way back to the hard left. and that ain't great. When you started out, I mean, same time that I started out, I'll make a statement and then tell me if you think it's true. When I started out, I said, all right, New York City is the land of opportunity, that I'm going to make my riches here and I am going to become financially independent working inside of New York City. did you feel that way way back in the 1980s when you started so anthony my first year goldman

was a money market salesman and after my bonus i made 85 000 and i remember that because my boss said hey well you made more than your father how do you must feel good about that and i was like yeah but the guy to sit sitting next me made 600 000 so and i did as much business so i don't feel good about that they fired that guy a week later uh that's a true story story. But I was paying $800 a month rent. I lived with four guys. We had a great apartment. We all had our own bedrooms, right? That's eight times 12. That's $10,000 a year. So call it 12, 13% of my income was going to rent. And today that number is 35 to 40%. And, you know, you have to make a whole lot more than $85,000 to live.

in Manhattan, even with your mates, right? Four bedroom in Fidei, you're still probably paying $2,500 each, if not more. So that's $36,000 of rent. And so it's gotten so much more expensive to live here. You know, taxes are a little higher. They're not that much higher, but they're a little higher because federal's come down and state and local's gone up. But, you know, the housing and the other costs have just gotten so much more expensive. So the secondary question, though, is a 25-year-old Mike Novagrats born in 2001. It's 2006. Is he coming to New York? Nashville, Miami, New York. Listen, the median salary that we paid at Galaxy last year, I. I believe was 330K.

You know, people get paid well on Wall Street, a lot better than we used to. Not everyone gets paid. Not everyone gets jobs on Wall Street, but if you can still get those jobs at Goldman or Citibank or new companies or tech companies. But so it's a small group of people that are doing really, really well.

And if you're in advertising or working for a magazine or any of the creative fields, you better have a rich parent. Or you're living in a suburb, or you're living with a whole bunch of people somewhere in one of the outer boroughs. Last question on this topic, and then we're going to move to another topic,

but it's five years from now, Michael. Is New York finding newfound religion and you have a tax cutter at the helm as governor and mayor or are we going to continue in the direction that we're on? Well, I think Mayor Scaramucci would do a good job of cutting our taxes and promoting growth. Listen, there are a lot of people that I think could step into the arena that would say with $120 billion budget. We don't need to raise it.

We just need to spend it better, right? You want to grow the economy so the tax base grows. but we don't need to spend more, we need to spend it better. And that was the editorial that Fareed Zakaria had done a few weeks ago, where he was looking at, you know, what we spend per student just going one direction. We have less students, but a much bigger, a much, much, much bigger student budget. We're spending $500,000 a person to be incarcerated at Rikers. last year we were giving away spending not giving a spending about 90,000 per

per undocumented immigrant here in, you know, subsidy in between their housing and and other scaffolding. Like I think we should take care of undocumented immigrants. Not 90,000. You'd be better off giving them each 35 and letting them do what they want. Save the 60 and let them spend the money. And so I really think we need to get to a place. where government is smaller and we're redistributing because people know what to do with the money.

People aren't generally dumb. They're not going to spend it on, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll. That's a myth. Give a family some help and they normally spend it on what's necessary. And we set up this. You've spent, and I have spent our share of money on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But we'll leave that for a different podcast, Novagrads. But again, like, we need to have big ideas because what we're doing ain't working. And the definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. What the blue states are doing is not working, right?

What our country is doing is not working at a federal level. So we need a much smarter tax code nationwide. And we need much smarter government locally. I wish I had a magic wand and we would just fix it. I am, I am totally, I am totally with you on that. that I want to go to our last topic, and that's Jensen Wang, who I find, I love this guy. I don't know him. You probably know him.

You probably met him a few times. I wish. I know a lot of friends that know him well, and I met his son-in-law. And I got a real kick. I met him once. I shook his hand once in an FBI only because he was with Melody Hobson, who's married to George Lucas, and she was kind enough to introduce me to him. But I don't know him, but I love him because he's like,

like, all right, I'm paying my taxes in California. I'm not moving to Texas or Miami. And oh, by the way, guys, stop laying off people. For companies with imagination, you will do more with less. For companies, when the leadership just out of ideas, they have nothing else to do, they have no reason to imagine greater than they are than when they have more capability, you know, they don't do more. He's criticizing CEOs who are laying people off. Now, we did mention last week that Dell had laid off 14,000 people. I just want to correct the record here that about 8,000 of those people, Michael, were actually a reduction in employees was attrition, 8% quit or leave on their own. So I just want to make sure we say these things accurately, but meta is also planning to lay off a lot of people. And Jensen says using AI to cut jobs is basically an alibi, and you're not optimizing.

you should be better at coming up with new ideas for your employees. What do you say to that? Yeah, listen, as a society, we're going to have to think about why, right? I mean, part of the reason you set up a company is because you employ people and you feel good that, you know, the 600 people that work for you are the 300 or the 30 or the 20 can take care of their families. And, you know, my first foreign posting was Japan. In Japan, you weren't allowed to fire people because the culture was once you get hired by a company, it's the company's responsibility to take care of you through your whole career.

And that created at one point too much inefficiency. And so they slowly changed it. But there was something really special about this idea that part of a company's responsibility is to its employees. It's to its shareholders. It's to its employees. It's to the community it operates in. And it's to its customers. Right.

And it's great, frankly, to the world. the kind of five stakeholders. We've gotten so far away from that, where it's shareholder, shareholder, shareholder. I mean, look at the money that Meta made last year, a breathtaking amount of money, but it's never good enough, right? And in some ways, that's what makes our stock market go up, up, but up.

But at one point, you know, like if it's Zuckerberg were $250 billion, I guess he's mad that Musk is worth $800 billion. But we've lost this idea of responsibility to, employees. And listen, it's a tough act because your job as a CEO is to build a wonderful company, right, and to make money and to return money to your shareholders. But how you balance that with taking care of your employees is a really complicated one. But we're not doing it well in the U.S. Michael, who's right, though? I mean, you know, you're a leader. You built several successful businesses, the CEO of Galaxy, what is your personal philosophy on this? And when you're thinking

about job cuts and so forth? I think you got to think of all your stakeholders. Listen, we've cut jobs plenty of times in Galaxy because we had to. We had to because this crypto business is volatile as heck and all of a sudden our revenue, we thought we're going to be here, jump drops to here, and you're like, ooh, I don't want to, I've got a responsibility that the people that I keep, that we have a business into our shareholders. So I think you really have to balance those stakeholders. You know, Paul Jones got involved in a actually helped set up a thing called Just Capital. It was really interesting because what Just Capital did was it interviewed hundreds of thousands of Americans and said, what do you care about at a company?

So it got what Americans cared about and made a scorecard. And then it ranked every company. and it generally was around how they take care of their employees. Is their product good for us or not good for us? You know, how is their stock done? So you get all this ranking. And then it would rank these companies and create an index. And what he found was the more just companies outperformed over time, like four or five percent versus the broad index.

And so there is a world where you run a double. and I'll call it just with those quotation marks. And I think that's my philosophy. Like, given our other forces, given the other inputs, let's run the most just company we can. I try to make sure every employee has equity, that people have career opportunities. When people want to leave because they see opportunities away,

I usually just hug them and say if I can't create a space where you're self-actualized. I'm glad you're finding one. I wish sometimes I've built a company that has an organic growth because we make widgets that just it's easier and easier to scale it. Like the crypto business is a hard business. You know, you kind of come in every year, you roll up your sleeves and you go back to work and kind of make your money starting from scratch, just like Wall Street firms and lots of them. You know, some of these other businesses, the exchange businesses has organically grown and grow on the same customer base. I'm always jealous of some of those businesses.

But no matter what your scenario is, I think you've got to really think through those different constituencies. What's weird is like Delaware law says you only have one constituency that cares and that's shareholders. Right. Like that is Delaware law, which is a mistake. And there's another, not everything is a Delaware listed company. I forgot there's another designation of companies that I think Ben and Jerry's was one and a few. That allows you the capacity to think about other stakeholders. But it's not, that's the, that's the exception, not the norm.

Listen, I think it's well said. All right. Last question. I'm going to let you go. 69,000, Michael, went to 67,000. You know I'm talking about Bitcoin. But over the weekend, I was thinking, wow, it seems like it's holding okay. Now it's bounced up to 71-ish,000.

What do you think of Bitcoin here? I think Bitcoin trades well. It just does. It doesn't trade studingly well, but it's outperformed a ton of other assets in this wartime. And there are buyers that come in when it drops. There are not a lot of sellers left. and so I'm optimistic. I'm hopefully optimistic, I should say.

Again, I don't see a scenario where it explodes north, but I think it can grind up to 80. 80 will be some fight and we'll see then. All right, brother. We'll see you next week. Let's hope the war is further. Well, look, let me tell you some of the market is saying that. So we better really hope that because if something they start bombing desalination plants,

I think the market's going to be rudely awakened. Yeah. We'll see. We're this close to really bad stuff. Right. And I mean, a lot of bad stuff has happened. Don't get me wrong. And there's a ripple and this is going to last longer just to kind of get shit flowing again.

But you start hitting the desalination plants or the big oil and gas plants outside of what they've already done. like this could be a multi, not a multi week, multi month, but a year, multi year problem. If this was a political podcast, Michael, you and I would have a sweepstakes right now running on who did Trump actually talk to from Iran, who he supposedly talked to. We'd have a sweepstakes. We got Jared and we got Whitkoff over there. Let's not answer that. We'll save that for a political podcast.

All right, lots of love. I'll see you next week. Be well. 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. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover

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