Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Venezuela Coup, Trump's Tariff Retreat, $40T Debt Bubble, Imperial Presidency, & Cuba Embargo

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Welcome back to another conversation with me, Anthony Scaramucci and my good friend Mike Novogratz. We cut through the noise to talk about what’s really driving markets right now—from Venezuela and geopolitics to why stocks, crypto, and commodities all look like they want to move higher at the same time. We also dig into debt, power, AI, and the uncomfortable truth that asset prices are booming while a lot of people still feel left behind. 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. It's George Washington to George Walker Bush, 7 trillion, 30 trillion Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Think about the magnitude of that. That money is in your pocket and my pocket and Sam Altman's pocket and Jensen Wang's pocket and Bill Gates's pocket. That's the money that has driven the markets. We're all playing on a giant credit bubble that's being held by Joe Q Public. So welcome to all things markets. I am Anthony Scaramucci. Nowvigrats.

All right. Mr. Novagrats, welcome back in a very happy new year to you and your family. But not a lot has been going on in the world since you and I last spoke. I guess it's just not a lot of things going on. But let's talk about some of the topical things. I say that most facetiously. Don't cry for me, Venezuela. Oh, no, that's Argentina.

I want to talk about that for a second. So, you know, I had the heads up on that. I'm pretty sure you had the heads up on that. I knew that that was coming. I didn't know the timing of it, of course, but I'm not surprised that it happened. But what are the ramifications of that? You're a macro investor. You look at this and say what?

You know, we'll see how this transition happens. Like, in no way or form was Maduro a good guy. And, you know, he ransacked the last elections. And we let them. And we, the global community, let them. You know, it's very hard. When do you intervene, when you not intervene? Trump decides to intervene

and there's a whole lot of ramifications with that. Like for Venezuelans, if it plays out the way they hope, it's going to be great. I already met with my smartest Venezuelan I knew on Sunday morning. We had a few drinks or coffees, you know, plotting like, how do you get your money down there? Who's the right people to invest with? Because if we get out this whole regime,

you bring in some free market regime, unbelievable opportunities. And so, you know, from a Venezuelan perspective. Or let me push back for a second. Again, I'm with you on that. Actually, I think that will be what happens. But let me push back for a second. What if it is, could it be Argentina? Or could it be Afghanistan?

I don't think it can be Afghanistan, but it can be Argentina. And listen, the question is, like right now, Trump's taking the old VP. All my Venezuelan friends said she was worse than Maduro, more radical. He was at least kind of moderate, just a drug dealer. And so, again, the administration's giving you three different stories. You listen to Rubio. She's just temporary until we can get set for elections, and there's no way she wins in an election,

especially if they're fairly monitored. And so that would be the best case. Three, four months from now, we have elections. you get new candidate with support of the United States, business comes back in and Venezuela as well. And so let's say maybe the Venezuela story is a positive one. Oil over time, more oil on the market, oil prices come lower, that's great for Trump, it's great for America.

What the miscalculation, if there is one, will be, is you just don't fly in and kidnap the president of another country. And so she's already making jokes about, well, maybe let's go get the guy from Taiwan. You know, Putin with Zelensky, you know, that's kind of has been off limits. War crimes, Geneva commens you, whatever you want to try to wiggle out of that, that's just the way people see things. And it certainly raises the possibility or raises the odds that China does something in Taiwan. Okay. Let me, let me, I want to stay on Venice well. for a second. 17% of the world's known. Oil reserves, 303 billion.

You care for what that number, because those reserves are self-reported. Okay. You got to be a big strong man. You can report your reserves big. I got a ton of oil. We don't really know how much oil they have. Would you say they have as much as the U.S.? $46 billion? I, they have a lot. I'm just not any good enough. It's also a more sour crude, right? It's a denser, harder crude. It's not, it's not soft like the, you got to bring it up to Texas and Louisiana to process it. Right. You like that, right? Yeah. And it's easy to get to, though, right? Because I mean, there you know, the geographic location. Let me play real politic for one second with you,

get you to react to it. So, and let's say they have, let's stipulate for this conversation. They've got 15. U.S. plus Canada. Call that 15. Let's call it 30% of the known oil reserves. And let's say they end up getting controlled by the United States. And obviously, you know, the North American reserves plus that. Does it flip the equation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East? And then secondarily, think of the pressure they could put on Russia, Michael, because, you know, $50 a barrel of oil, no Bueno for, no Bueno for Saudi, but also no Bueno for Moscow. So what's your reaction on that?

equation is different. And let me tell you why. You know, the leaders of the Gulf, Abu Dhabi specifically, same with Saudi, Qatar, have worked really hard over the last 20 years to develop deep and real relationships with power players on both Wall Street and in D.C. I was at, you know, Koldoon's birthday party. He runs one of the big sovereign wealth funds in Abu Ghazir. I'll be It's probably the most important non-royal in Abu Dhabi. And it was like a diplomatic dinner. You know, every one kind of important in private equity was represented. D.C. was represented.

And so I don't think their relationship is going anywhere, even if the price of oil and gas goes down. They have cash. They have investments. They have a monster war chest. And they now have a story that's attracting a ton of people to their region. right, which is safety, which is no taxes, which is will provide you a nice place to have a nice life. And so I think it's important from Latin America perspective. You know, the U.S. is already self-sufficient in oil.

Like, we're not a great importer of oil anymore. And so I think getting the price down is good. I mean, listen, Trump or whoever takes over after Trump needs low interest rates because we We've got $40 trillion of debt to finance. A couple more questions on Venezuela and the Latin American basin, the Caribbean basin. What do you think this means for Cuba? You know, I was down in Cuba three months ago. I love Cuba.

I love the people down there. I love the vibe. They hate Marco Rubio. Everyone down there hates them. You know, there's a small group of Florida politicians that have gotten lots of Cuban money that don't like what's going on in Cuba. Most Cubans just want to have a decent lifestyle. Their country's on the brink of breaking because we've been embargoing it.

Like it's weird we embargo Cuba. We didn't embargo anywhere else. Like, ah, let the whole rest of the world do what they want, but not Cuba. It felt mean-spirited. It felt misdirected. It felt like I wanted to punch Rubio in the jaw when I spent my five days. Three of the days I was down there, they had a blackout. I ain't no electricity for the whole island.

And so you felt a lot of pathos for the Cuban people. Listen, they don't love their government, but they do deserve a right to do the best they can with what they got. And we have been literally, since 2018, Trump knew he needed Rubio in that second election. And so he basically said, I'll give Marco whatever he wants in Cuba. And, you know, we kind of did a bad thing. Remember Obama, we had opened it up. And things were starting to boom. Obama went to a baseball game down there before he left the White House.

Yeah, I think it was a terrible decision to do it about face. But I think, given where we are now, they're going to try to break Cuba. Okay. Now, that's like picking on a, you know, a broken down buddy of yours who has one leg and an eye patch and one one cane. Like whoopty, whoopty. Like, the U.S. as a bully is a terrible, freaking global story. And the story that's going around is the U.S. is a big, ugly bully. And that's a story that I don't like.

I don't think America in the long run is going to benefit from. Period. Well, I mean, also the rhetoric around Greenland, I think is nonsensical. You are like me. I'm assuming you want there to be benign, predictable, general governmental policy, benign, predictable relationships with our allies. I don't think we want an invasion of Greenland. I don't know. Do you want an engagement of Greenland?

Certainly in NATO crises right there, right? Denver's part of NATO. You know, we've got a joint security pact. I mean, I think it's bizarre. All right. So, but markets in general, trading day opened first week of the new year, effectively, the 5th of January.

Markets opened up relatively benign, right? They're up a percent. You remember Matt McConaughey, boom, boom, bump, we're a bull market. We're in a bull market. So I wanted flip. to our second part of the show. And I want to talk a little bit about that ball market that we're in.

This is something that you did predict at the end of last year. You said money would flow beginning part of January. There's a big setup after the tax loss selling, et cetera. You know, you tell me, how does the market look to you? Resilient, obviously. Consumption supported, right? People want to get the short dollar trade on, look at things like Aussie dollar. I think Euro takes out 118 pretty soon.

I mean, stocks look like they're ready to rip. Gold and silver resuming their trend. Copper is going to be the silver of 2026. Okay. Why? You need copper for data center builds. You need copper for all kinds of stuff. And there is a shortage of copper.

The supply demand doesn't make sense right now. It's out of balance. And it takes a long time to build a new copper mine. 15 years, maybe 10. And so it's not like you turn the supply back on. And so I think you're going to see an awesome opportunity in copper. I actually don't own enough. You know, I kind of reduce some of my positions at the end of the year.

And I thought, oh, first we go get them and boom, it's off on a freaking heater. And crypto's catching up. You know, I think crypto, there was a lot of tax loss selling, a lot of selling in the whole. Bitcoin's gone from mid-80s to 94. What about whale selling, Michael? Do you still see a lot of whale selling from your business? We haven't. We think we have some whales that will overwrite with calls, but we're not seeing direct selling right now.

I mean, look at the XRP. That thing went from 180 to 230 in five days. Boom. That's 50 on a two. You know, that's a. Well, we have a lot of young listeners. So when you say override with calls, let me just take a second, explain to people. You could have a large position in something, and you will basically write a call option to somebody at a high.

higher price. Let's say you own something at 100. You write a call option at 110. And if your position never reaches 110, you've collected the premium on that call option. It's a way that people that have big positions can make current income. And if the market really goes higher and takes the amount of their calls, they say, well, I sold a little bit of my position. So people will sell calls on 10% of their positions. So their worst case is they still have 90% left at a higher level. and quite frankly, if the level's 10% up, that 100's gone to 110, they're back to 100. So discipline selling with some potential yield replacement sort of really, it's a yield theory. But you don't see a lot of big whales selling at this moment.

We don't. Listen, and that's not our bread and butter. We see some, and we had a huge one last year. A lot of that activity came out of China. And, you know, it's a little more opaque. We sometimes see it second, you know, the second hand, like it goes to someone that we know who then sells it. But that seems to have slowed. Okay.

I want to go to the Fed. Okay. When we last spoke, we were thinking about a Fed chair. Given what's going on in Venezuela, I think it's no surprise that the president has not announced his new Fed chair. Do you think that that's still coming here, the announcement at least, in the first quarter? or you think he's now going to wait until... No, it's certainly going to come in the first quarter. You know, Trump loves the apprentice,

that whole keeping people, interviewing people, keeping them on edge, doing it publicly, semi-publicly. And so I think we're still in that game. I thought it was going to happen pre-year, and I was wrong, but I don't think it matters too much. You're going to get one of the Kevin's, and they're both dovish.

One of the Kevin's. Yep. Okay. And we're, And if we're looking at overnight rates, six months from now, where are they? Nine months from now, two and a quarter. All right. So it's very good.

Team Novogratch is bullish on 26 then, right? Barish to dollar, yield curve steepener, still long commodities, real assets, and bullish the equity market. And AI, you're okay with the current pricing in AI? You know, AI's so confusing because it's just AI. I read a couple articles over the break that just blew my mind in terms of, you know, the worry about potential AI learning from itself and creating its own defenses, not just happening on one LLM, but happening on all five of the different ecosystems, even though they're not connected. And so there's a, yeah, there's a group of people that are getting scared. it's just hard to get great intel. The intel I have, which is real, is there is an insatiable need for power.

I am praying every day that I get extra power, either, you know, through acquisition or through being granted it by, you know, in our case, the state of Texas, and the Erkot grid. Because the moment I have it and put up my shingle, my doorbell is rigging nonstop. Because people need it. This is crypto. This is miners. This AI power trade, the data center trade is not over. I promise you.

So Michael, I, you know, full disclosure. I'm long a lot of Bitcoin. I own other assets like Solana. And I own some of these DATs, which are these digital asset treasuries, some which would include things like strategy or the Salana base one forward. I believe you're an investor. alongside of me in that. What happened to digital asset treasuries and where do you think they're going? Because, you know, some of our buddies that we're close to think they should always trade

below their net asset value. I think they're going to trade below their net asset value. I think, listen, I think we all got caught off in a bit of a hype trade. Okay. And they're going to trade below their NAV somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of NAV, unless, the management team turns them into companies. Like you can take that group of assets, say you've got $800 million with assets

all in Solana are all in Ethereum and say, hey, let's create a neobank. Let's create a, let's create something with this capital. Remember, the guys running those, the CEOs of those dads and the boards,

their job is shareholder value. So, what I'm feeling pretty comfortable about is you're not going to get shareholder value just by owning the underline. You got ETFs. The Michael Saylor, I'm going to hype you into bidding it up so I can sell it a premium. So the old investors make money off the new investors, that cycle. That game's over. It worked for Michael Saylor.

It worked for Tom Lee. He worked a little bit for Joe Lubin. It worked for nobody else. Three out of 15 or three out of 50. the rest of the people have their shovel and they got to dig themselves out of the shit they they be the great capital allocator that you are let's say i put you in charge of one of those what would you do would you disband it would you uh would you use the capital trades at 70 cents of the dollar i would buy the stock and sell the equity and and narrow that range but i would be

looking for an idea where i could play up the skill set of the people in my firm right and that's of what Ford is doing. It is really racing its head to figure out how do I turn this into something that is different than an ETF that can create a narrative, a story to bring people in because it's exciting. It's not just owning Solana. It's not just owning Ethereum. And we haven't seen a whole lot yet. There probably will be some takeovers, but it's harder to do than you think. You think there'll be activism? You know, because there will be some of them trade low enough. Yeah, you've seen closed-end funds to get a lot of activism, right? And so if they trade it too big of a discount, so I'm going to go in there and bust it to try to get the assets out of there, right? But I think because the assets are the same as the underlying in lots of ways, the manager has almost a fiduciary responsibility at one point to sell the asset and buy, like if he's thinking about the shareholder, that's his role.

If he's thinking about his management fees, and so they're going to have that conflict, right? some of these guys got big management fees to run those assets. So, you know, you grew up in a rule of law, sort of a country. You grew up in a rules-based. Rule-law family. My father was the rule of law. Right. Oh, there you go.

Rule of Law family. See, I brought up the rule of law. You already got scared. You were looking for the wooden spoon or the belt to hit you. Yeah, we got them both. But we're now in a weirder situation, which I think is a little less predictable. Maybe you'll push back on me. But I look at our current situation, I see that Congress is like toothless.

There's no real check on the president's executive powers. And so if he wants to remove a despot, he can send the army to remove a despot. If he wants to, you know, make decisions related to tariffs, on with the tariffs, off with the tariffs. We'll get to the tariff discussion in a second, but this is really more of a rule of law issue. You worried about that from a market point of view? Like, you know, Wall Street likes rule of law and Wall Street likes that predictability, and we're not getting that predictability now? We are teetering on a bad precipice.

I fundamentally believe that we're 11 months away from a real rebuke of this, you know, free-for-all. I think if you had the midterms today, the Democrats would win by 40 seats. I think Americans don't like what they're seeing, and they would show up in mass to say enough. They don't like the belittling. They don't like the lack of respect to the law. They don't like the graft. But would that really change something?

So let's say the Democrats won the House. There's still no real check on the imperial presidency anymore, is there? Well, it all depends what the Senate does. But it starts a whole process of nonstop, you know, investigation. and impeachment and, but yeah, listen, we never anticipated an imperial presidency. And the Supreme Court's going to get pushed. Listen, you can mock the Supreme Court. They've gone away left to Trump's side.

In the long run, though, we still have Amy Coney Barrett, you know, Judge Roberts. Like, there's a decency in a lot of these judges that will just bend. And so Trump doesn't win every case. We'll see on the tariffs, I think he's going to lose the tariff case or at least lose half the tariff case. Half the tariff case, meaning you won't have to give a full rebate, but he'll have to go forward. Yeah, we'll see. He might lose the whole thing. I mean, I think, you know, what Trump is so good at, like the Epstein thing was horrible.

It was getting worse. And now you go to Venezuela. We're all talking Venezuela and not Epstein. You know, the guy who Jack Smith, who had him testify like the 30th of the year, like trying to squeeze him into the day that no one listened. I mean, if you listen to his testimony, it is damning. And he gave that testimony under oath with the threat of being thrown in jail and said, guys, this is what happened.

And you're like, how did that not, how did Trump maneuver his way out of that testimony before the election and then he got elected and the Supreme Court said, well, now that he's elected, you can't deal with him now. You can't distract the president. Like, I don't.

Everyone should listen to that testimony and really rethink what you think about what happened on January 6th. But generally, now, let me say a positive statement about President Trump. Generally, I think the business community likes him. Generally, I think they see him,

as somebody who's going to help asset prices and generally going to help energy prices go down, asset prices go up. Listen, Trump has a lot of the same strengths and weaknesses from an economy perspective that Biden did. Don't forget, Biden created more jobs than any president in history. The stock market went up all four years and ended on the highs, right? And we had OK GDP growth.

So like, other than Biden having the, the, the first couple years of the high inflation that came down, like for a rich guy, it was pretty good to be a Biden guy. It's been pretty good to be a rich guy, Trump guy. But both general populations during Biden and Trump said the same thing. I don't care what the numbers say. I don't care what the stock market say.

I don't care what the fuck an economist tell me. It doesn't feel good to me. Right. It didn't feel to the middle class in Biden. It doesn't feel to the good at the middle class in Trump. And quite frankly, it doesn't feel good to the lower upper class in either of those, let alone the working class. So let's workshop the following scenario. And I agree with you on that. And I think that's the problem.

And, you know, you get $3 a gallon of oil in Northern California. They haven't seen that in four or five years. All of a sudden, you know, Trump becomes part of the narrative on affordability in a good way. But let's go, but let's go to. Oh, we're a long way from the midterms, by the way. I don't want anyone to We both, we both, we both know that. He's got money to spend. We don't know that. It's longer than dog years.

But go to the tariff issue because I think Trump, I mean, again, I'm going to make a proposition, supposition, I'm going to get you to agree or disagree. I think they've got an inkling that they're going to lose the tariff case. I agree. And I think they're starting to slowly repeal and stall tariffs. You saw what they did with the furniture and the upholsterers, right? They waived the 25% for now. And they're going through the tariffs and they're starting to pull back on them. So when the case comes out, the Trump narrative will be, well, we were so super successful with these tariffs that we're pulling back on them.

Yeah, exactly. What's your reaction to that? Listen, they are, I mean, they are shameless politicians. They're good at it. Like, they say that, like, it's, it is shocking how shameless. Like all politicians are shameless. This group has been more shameless to anything I've ever seen. You know, and you can see it in every branch of the government now.

And so what people learned is if you keep telling them the lie, at least the 40% that you need to believe your lie works. I mean, Pete Higgsveth, going after Mark Kelly, who was a combat hero astronaut, you know, and taking part of his pay and reducing his rank. I don't think that's going to play to the military. I don't think it's going to play to the American public. No, we know that you and I know.

You're a former veteran, but I'm very close to the military with all different charities I support. You know, the generals that I served in the Trump administration, all of which I'm still very close to. I think the military does not like these capricious actions. And they certainly don't like what's going on with Mark Kelly. He had the First Amendment right to say whatever he wanted. You're going to demote him. He's a duly elected senator from Arizona. So again, I want to bring it back to markets.

This is about all things markets. The market doesn't care, though, right? The market that Mike Novagrats and Anthony Scaramucci grew up in, the market of the 1990s, we had certain suppositions. If this stuff was happening, we would probably be reacting very differently, right? It's amazing. I think we're going to look back in 10 years. 15 years. Like, pull up your Google real quick and say, what was total U.S. debt 15 years ago?

Do you got a computer in front of you? Okay, Michael, I don't have to look that up, unfortunately, because I'm an expert at this. 16, 17 years ago, it was a 12.5.13 trillion dollar deficit, approximately. That just shows you how crazy things are. All right. Right. So we've added 23 trillion. million dollars of debt. What does that mean? It means we've taken... Let me be more dramatic, because George Washington to George Walker Bush, seven trillion. Yeah. Okay, 30 trillion Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Think about the magnitude of that. That money is in your pocket and my pocket and Sam Altman's pocket in Jensen Wang's pocket and Bill Gates's pocket. It's that's the money that has driven the markets.

Right, exactly. We're all playing on a giant credit bubble that's being held by Joe Q public. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And that's the thing that you and I, Ray Dalio, and others are going to be long-term fearful of well. I mean, look, it's been a great show, as always. I could probably talk to you for several hours every day. We're going to wrap here. And we'll be back, Michael, with more from All Things Markets.

Thanks again for joining. Love on, Anthony. All right, man. Peace. Thanks, brother.