Prof G Markets - The $1.5B Insider Trade Before Trump’s Iran Post — ft. Anthony Scaramucci

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Ed Elson speaks with Anthony Scaramucci about the surge in insider trades tied to Trump’s Truth Social posts on the Iran war. They discuss how widespread the corruption may be and whether it could carry political consequences. Then, Steve Eisman returns to the show to break down the deepening cracks in the private credit market. Finally, Ed examines the pattern of insider trading allegations throughout Trump’s second term, and what, if anything, can be done to rein it in. Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital. Steve Eisman is the Host of the Real Eisman Playbook. Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's how many people are in Ireland's Navy Reserve, one of the smallest in the world. Here's an Irish joke. What's the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral? One less drunk. Money markets, Matt. If money is evil, then that building is held. Welcome to Provegey Markets.

I'm Ed Elson. it is March 26th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices swung through the day but ended the session in the green. Oil declined, treasury yields fell, and finally, META and Google shares were little changed after the companies were found liable of negligence in the social media addiction trial. Okay, what else is happening? The Iran War is shining a spotlight on insider trading, and Washington may be at the center of it, Monday morning, roughly one and a half billion dollars in S&P futures were purchased, and

$192 million in oil futures were sold. That was five minutes before President Trump announced that productive conversations with Tehran were underway. The position netted $60 million minutes after the Truth Social Post. Senator Chris Murphy called it, quote, mind-blowing corruption and asked publicly whether Trump, a family member or a White House staffer was behind the trade. Meanwhile, the FT separately flagged $580 million in crude oil futures that traded 14 minutes before the announcement. Okay, here to help us untangle. What is going on here? We're speaking with Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital.

Anthony, thank you for joining us. Please, I know you have thoughts. First of all, it's great to be on. So I want to add to that if you don't mind. So April 2nd, 2025, Liberation Day, they put trades on that got short the market prior to the announcement. You know, when Trump came down from Mount Evil, like Orange Moses with the big tablets, okay, they got short the market prior to that divulgement.

A week later, prior to Trump saying he was pulling back the tariffs, there was going to be a 90-day moratorium. They got along the market. Okay. On October the 10th, about an hour before the tweet went out related to the rare earth minerals and the fight that we started with China, they got short the market, they got short the crypto market.

So this is another example of it, but it's been very consistent throughout the administration. Tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars are being made. And, you know, so much so that the head of the enforcement area that's supposed to police this stuff,

she resigned last week because she said she can't get the agency focus on this. Now, we sent Martha Stewart, And so you're young, Ed, I think you know who she is. I watched the documentary, so I know. Okay, so for your younger viewers, she had $45,000 of profits that she had a disgorge, and she spent five months at a federal prison because they caught her, quote, unquote, insider trading. This is hundreds of millions of dollars.

Okay, but there's a bigger problem here for the American people. And that is, this is rampant. Trump has taken it exponential with his team. but do you know a Democratic representative is Kelly Morrison? So Kelly Morrison bought seronic technologies, a name I didn't know, but she bought seronic technologies, which is an autonomous warship company nine days after the beginning of the war with Iran, right as the Navy was awarding serronic contracts. Her office said that her portfolio is managed by a blind trust and an investment manager,

and she had no prior knowledge. But government watchdog said, hey, whoa, this is a pretty clear conflict of interest. So I'm here to tell your viewers and listeners, Trump has gone exponential, but Nancy Pelosi, she's traded her account better than any hedge fund manager that I've ever met in my life,

myself included, you picked the biggest edge fund managers, and it's not just her. It's bipartisan. Okay, so they're running rampant in Washington with the corruption. As an American, I'm embarrassed by it. As an American, I would like it to stop. The insider trading at the Congress level is legal.

The insider trading at the Trump level is probably not legal because it's not Trump himself doing it, but it's people close to him that are actually doing it, and that probably makes it illegal. So here's two things I would say very quickly. Thing number one, if you're a young kid, if you're the younger version of me, growing up in the 1970s,

Professor Galloway, growing up in the 1970s, we had hope on our side and aspiration. I'm not saying there wasn't corruption, Ed, in the country, but it was veiled. It wasn't this big. It wasn't this dramatic. And when you have corruption like this,

at this scale, if you're a young kid, if you're a young Scott Galloway, young Anthony Scaramucci, you're looking up and you're seeing a concrete ceiling. You're saying, okay, oh my God,

there's a two-tier. system. There's one tier for those guys, a different tier for us. We're never going to make it. And it creates a tremendous amount of cynicism in a society. So I'm heartbroken by it, but nothing's going to happen. And they're going to make some more tweets and trade the oil markets. You know, somebody got short oil before the president's announcement yesterday, where we said we're getting this big gift from Iran. And it turned out, I guess, one of the Thai ten, bankers was able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz as a sign of good faith, which was, you know, lots of oil coming back out of the international markets. And of course, oil went down. And guess what they did? They closed the short position. So I think this stuff is reprehensible, but I don't think it's changing. I'm so glad you mentioned all of the previous instances that this has happened, because it seems that everyone is focused on, look at the insider trading as it relates to Iran. And then my mind goes back to, yes, exactly. day, when we seems to see the same thing, then the post-liberation day taco. We've seen this

constantly over and over again. As you say, it's happened on both sides, but the level with which it has been, I guess, shameless, the fact that they don't seem to care at all, the fact that the kids are investing in these drone companies as well before we go and launch these attacks on Iran, combined with the fact, as you also mentioned, you made all the points that I hoped you would make, which is the SEC director has left because she tried to investigate this stuff, and she got scolded by her bosses, and we saw similar things with the DOJ as well. And so I guess the question becomes, I mean, how bad has this gotten? And do you think that people are properly recognizing this?

I see what's happening. This is like the greatest corruption we've ever seen, or at least that I'm aware of, that to me is like it's a cut above just regular political gripes. This seems to me like this is a serious issue that, I don't know, that people need to at least vote on or at least consider voting on. So the woman that you're referring to is her name is Margaret Ryan. Because she was just with the SEC for many years. and she basically resigned under protest because she said that she cannot get any enforcement of any of these actions. And by the way, these are easy to tag and these are easy to geo-center the tag on the trading. You can find out immediately who's doing all this stuff and then you can start bringing cases. And she's been told by her bosses that she cannot do that. So I think that's reprehensible. But I want to take you back because you said, this is the worst corruption ever.

We had the teapot dome scandal, unbelievable corruption, but those people got prosecuted. That was at the turn of the century, the 1800s into the 1900s. We had the ab scam case when I was in high school. This is back in the 1980s where two congressmen were caught on a bribe, okay, where the FBI had a wire on them and they got caught saying, oh yeah, give us that money and we'll change our position on this policy inside the government, and they got caught. So the point I'm making, we have corruption in the country, we have political corruption, banking corruption, all sorts of corruption, but attached to that corruption was some level of law enforcement and some level of justice. I'm not saying it's

perfect, but at least there was a supposition in the country's, oh, wow, do something wrong like that, that bald face, there will be repercussions. And that repercussion, Ed, creates a deterrent for people. Yeah. Do you see what I mean? Like, I'm going to, I'm going to speaking at the 92nd Y with a guy who wore, got caught insider trading, he wore a wire for the federal government, and he stopped a huge insider trading ring in the 2006, 7, and 8 time period on Wall street. That stuff is over. Okay. And so it makes the market's unfair. It makes the pricing in the market manipulative. And it's giving a license to these people to do what they want. Yeah. And, you know, look, the flip side is, you know, the congressmen are going to say, you pay me $180,000 a year. I can't

afford to live. And so I'm going to enrich myself by doing this. And I want to make this last point, because I need your listeners to hear this. We have this thing called Citizens United, which means people can give unlimited donations to the congressman, right? All political candidates, all policies, unlimited donations. So here's what's going on. The Congress has a 14% approval rating. It's slightly above Kim El-Jung, the North Korean dictator.

However, the individual congressman has a 95% incumbent rate. So their narrative to their people is, who cares, man? I'm going to do whatever the hell I want. The money's coming in from big food, big pharma, big business, big wealthy. I'm going to get reelected. And so what do we trade in today? What information am I to get? You know how many times a congressman has bought defense stocks the day before, two days before the contract is announced that the appropriations is going to that defense contractor?

I mean, it is staggering. and it is sad and it is tragic. And it's very unfair to the American people. My question, gee, before we let you go, I mean, you're in the politics game, or at least you're a political commentator, you have been in politics. I mean, this, to me, seems like it could be the issue

going into the midterms and perhaps for the presidential election as well. That, I mean, there are certain issues that are political issues. There are certain things that are cultural. There are issues with DEI. There are, you know, some people believe that tariffs are a good idea. Some people think it's a bad idea.

But this issue seems to be so brazen and so criminal that it makes me believe that this is probably going to be the ultimate issue. And that is the issue of corruption and insider trading and profiting off of being elected into a position of power as someone who's in politics, do you think that that will transpire? So I don't. And it should, but I don't. Let me tell you, let me give a quick history.

Peter Switzer wrote about this insider trading stuff in 2012. 60 Minutes did a big story on it. And the Congress said, oh, we're going to pass something called the 2012 Stock Act, which prohibited the use of non-public information for trading. And so there was an eight-month period of time where the Congress was handcuffed and they couldn't trade. then by voice vote, they didn't even want to go on to the floor because they didn't want to be seen on C-SPAN. By voice vote, they called in and said, let's put it back in. Wow.

Okay, we're going to vote on putting it back in. Yes, we're voting and putting it back in. So now fast forward, it's 14 years later, and the last 14 years they've been running this racket. So Chris Murphy, you mentioned him earlier in the program. He's a senator from Connecticut. He's trying to come up with something now that's called the No Betts Act. Okay, and he's basically trying to say if we can stop the prediction markets, make it illegal to bet on assassinations or make it illegal to bet on wars. It's called the Betts Off Act, I should say.

But in any event, I don't think that's going to pass. And by the way, if it does pass for political purposes leading into the midterms, as soon as the midterms are over it, they're going to vote back to get it put it back on. I'm just telling you what these guys do. This is why people don't like them. Exactly. It's very depressing. We could talk about it for hours, but I've got to let you go. Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital. Anthony, always appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Real pleasure to always be on with you, man. Thank you. After the break, alarm bells sound off in private credit. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, simply put at simply put.profgemedia.com.

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Private credit is in crisis, and investors are rushing for the exits. Aries Management and Apollo both capped withdrawals at 5% this week after redemption requests came in at more than 11%. That means investors got back less than half of what they asked for. Meanwhile, Moody's downgraded a fund run by KKR and a future standard to junk status on Monday, saying the fund's asset quality had worsened more than its peers. The latest wave of fear wiped out more than $10 billion in market cap from Ares, Apollo, Blackstone and KKR on Tuesday. And here to tell us what is going on here, what is driving this turmoil in the private credit market?

We are speaking with Steve Eisman, the legendary Big Short investor, also host of the Real Eisman Playbook. Steve, thank you very much for joining us again on Proftery Markets. We wanted to have you on to talk about this because you were. the guy who is telling us about this just a few weeks ago when we had you on that Friday episode and things seemed to have gotten even worse. So just remind us what is happening in the private credit markets and what we've learned here. So the, you know, the funny thing is that from my podcast, I do this weekly wrap that I put out every Friday and every week for the last probably two months I'm speaking about private credit. And I just amusing for your

You know, I start writing the rap when I wake up Monday, and I do work every single day. And so for the last several weeks, the way it's been written and it goes, and then there was some more bad news about private credit on Monday, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I wake up Tuesday, and then I added a paragraph, and on Tuesday, blah, blah, and on Wednesday. And so it's absolutely relentless. Yes. So let me, let's take a step back.

there are two issues here they're related but they're not exactly the same the two issues are should private credit have been sold to retail right and we're i think the answer to that question is mostly no and we're suffering the ramifications of that right now and the second issue which is related is are we starting a credit cycle in private credit, and how bad is it going to be? So let me address the first question first, and then we'll get to the second question, because every piece of news that you hear is related to that.

You know, private credit funds were originally created for institutional money, and that makes a lot of sense because you're talking about long-term illiquid loans, and institutions know what they're getting. They're getting a higher yield in exchange for less liquidity, and that's fine. After private credit basically sold their funds to every single institution on planet Earth, they looked around and they said, okay, now how do we sell it to? And they said, let's sell it to retail. The problem is that with retail, you have to create liquidity. So what they did was they created mostly what I like to call the illusion of liquidity or semi-liquidity.

Now, all this was disclosed. None of this is illegal. So no one's going to jail for this. you know, this was all disclosed in the prospectuses, whether the retail investors actually understood what they were getting into, you know, who knows, but no question it was adequately disclosed. All these funds have quarterly caps in their documents. Most of the funds have a 5% quarterly redemption cap. Some have seven, but most have five.

And so what's been happening is, as for the last year, the news on private credit has gotten steadily worse, and we could talk about, you know, where that's happened. And so the redemption notices are universally coming in now above the 5% cap, and with the exception of Blackstone in the most recent quarter, which did honor a 7.9% redemption notice, even though the cap is 5%. Everybody else is just honored the cap. That's part one.

Part two is that we have not. had a credit cycle in the United States since the great financial crisis. And that has bred a tremendous amount of complacency amongst lenders. And we are overdue for a credit cycle. And traditionally, you know, if you know anything about lending history, whenever there is a credit cycle, the place that it takes place almost 100% of the time is the asset class that grew the most. So in the great financial crisis, the asset class that grew the most with subprime mortgages, and that blew up the most. Since the great financial crisis, the banks have not had much loan growth at all. All the loan growth has really been in private credit.

Private credit 10 years ago was a $300 billion per year market, and now it's close to a $2 trillion per year market. Wow. So you're starting to see credit. and credit. You know, you had this, you mentioned it, this KKR fund got downgraded by Moody's. By the way, the rating agencies are always very slow. If the rating agencies are downgrading it, you know it's bad. That's a real problem. You know, now it's a problem. Because if even the rating agencies admit there's a problem, you know, problem. Yes. So you have one downgrade of a fund because it's non-accruals were too high. I think they were five and a half percent, which

is probably the highest in the industry. You have an in what the, there's private credit. There are three parts of private credit. There's direct lending. There's asset back lending and then call it other. The biggest category is direct lending and then asset back lending. Direct lending, which gets the most press, 80% of that business is basically private credit lending money to private equity to buy companies.

What makes this sort of incestuous is that most private credit funds are run by private equity companies. So in a sense, what you have is private equity raising money in its private credit funds to lend to itself to go buy the companies that it wants to buy. If that sounds circular, it's only because it is. So 80% of private credit is related to that. Now, between 2018 and 2022, private equity went on a buying binge of software companies.

Yeah. Now, that looked like a great decision because, you know, for the last 30 years, the best place in tech to be was in software. You know, you have the SaaS model software as a, I think it's called software as a service model where you pay monthly. So everybody loves that because it's so easy to model. Software companies have done exceptionally well as technology has grown, and they want on a buying binge. So apparently about 25% of all direct lending is in software companies that were bought between 2018 and 2022.

Now, those companies were bought when interest rates were considerably lower than where they are today. A lot of that happened during COVID. And about 11% of those loans are going to need to be refinanced next year, and another 20% are going to be refinanced the year after that. And if they are refinanced at all, they're going to be refinanced at considerably higher interest rates. So that's a problem.

And some of them may not be refinanced at all, because people are, literally freaking out about the impact of AI on software, as I'm sure you've told your viewers many, many times that I've told mine. Yes. So what's happened, and then there was a piece of news today that I thought was very interesting, which it was not in the direct lending world. It was in the asset back world. Barclays put out a press release.

I don't know if it was a press release. It was a Bloomberg story. I think it was a Bloomberg story. that Barclays has dramatically pulled back from making asset-back loans to small to medium-sized companies. So it'll only make asset-back loans to large corporates. This is what happens at the beginning of a credit cycle. The news gets bad.

People start to worry about losses. Underwriting standards start to tighten. Certain borrowers are cut off and lending gets tight. Yes. And when that happens more often than not, but not all the time, you go into a recession. Private credit is now big enough, and it has been the entire growth engine of lending for the last 10 years, that if private credit starts to get very, very tight, that's going to hurt our economy a lot. So I think that is the big question for regular investors, because, I mean, we saw what happened when that credit cycle occurred in 2000.

people got crushed. It was just total chaos. And everyone knows about your role in that story. It's not going to be as bad as that. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's got to calm down. I mean, we'll talk about that. If there's a recession, it'll be a recession.

It's not going to be. I feel very strongly. It won't be a financial crisis. Which is an important point because that is where the mind goes to. That's where the mind goes because of PTSD. Yes. Everybody has it from 2008. But it does seem, I mean, when you think about the dynamics,

here, if I could just try to, like, simplify really what's happening. It's almost like this big, a huge amount of leverage was built up on top of these software acquisitions. And now that everyone has decided, actually, maybe those acquisitions weren't such a good idea, suddenly it means that the lending that was built on top of those acquisitions was an even worse idea. Those could get totally wiped out. And the dynamics... Well, the equity gets wiped out first. Yes. So how... And here's the problem. with analyzing this. It would be nice to know, you know, what is the average, you know, for your typical one of these software companies, you know, let's say, I'll just make up a number.

Let's say $100 million was lent to buy this company. That's the debt. How much is the equity? Is there $100 million in equity? Is there $10 million in equity? I don't know. And these companies aren't disclosing it. So, you know, if there's a lot of equity there, then maybe the lenders are protected, just the equity gets wiped out or really or hurt very, very, very badly. Right. But we don't know, because we don't have enough data. And in that dynamic, what you have is, as we've discussed here, these withdrawal requirements that are becoming more and more discussed in the news, which has the feeling of a bank run. It's like, oh, no, I'm not. so confident anymore. I want to take my money out. And the banks say, no, you can't take your

money out, which makes people even more anxious. They want to keep taking the money out, which is kind of the problem. And in the case of a regular bank, the people who are trying to take their money out are regular people. Yes. In the case of the private credit markets, it seems that it's mostly not regular people, but also kind of regular people because you say they opened it up to retail. Well, it's retail. It's people with 401k. It's people with brokerage accounts, it's not, I would say, it's not lower middle class people. Right. It's people with money who are upset that they can't get their money back. I'd be upset, too. Yeah. I guess the final question before I let you go here is, you know, if this occurs, if the credit cycle, it does occur

here, how bad would it be? What would that recessionary moment look like? And, and, you know, how much better would it be compared to, say, 2008? Okay. That's actually a very, very important question to address. What made 2008, as calamitous as it was, was that not only was there a recession, but there was an actual fear that the entire banking system was going to collapse. And then when the banking system collapses,

that means if you go to the bank, you can't get your money. That's planet Earth burn situation. And that's why the government had to step in. Since the financial crisis, I think the Federal Reserve, which is the chief bank regulator of the United States now, that was what happened now from Dodd-Frank, has done a very, very, very good job recapitalizing the banking system and reducing its risks. Not that it has no risk, this industry does make loans to these private credit funds. But I would categorically state that the U.S. banking system is better capitalized and it has ever been, in history, hard stop.

It's never been even close to this well capitalized. It has never, also has never had as much liquidity on its balance sheets as it has today. So I don't worry if there is a recession that there's a banking crisis, leaving Silicon Valley aside, which is a very, very unique kind of situation. If we have a credit cycle, private credit could put the economy into a recession. And it'll be a garden, I think a garden variety of recession. People will lose, I mean, it's not going to be pleasant. Nobody's going to be happy and say, oh, it's only just a recession. No one's going to put candles on a birthday cake and say, how wonderful is this.

But it'll be a garden variety of recession and the economy will slow. People will lose jobs. And eventually we'll come out of it. I, you're not going to, no one's going to be worried about J.P. Morgan or City Group or Wells Fargo or any, any of the back. It's just, it's just unimaginable to me at this point. Yeah, equal parts encouraging and also quite worrying at the same time. We'll probably have to do another episode on this digging deeper. I'm sure we're going to see a lot more head. Oh, you think there's going to be more new.

Like, like maybe tomorrow. Exactly. You'll have to redo your, your monologue. again. I have to redo my rap. Your rap. Steve Eisenman, host of the real Eisenhower playbook. Steve, always appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, we've already discussed

the insider trading scandal as it relates to Trump and Iran, the fact that $2 billion worth of oil and S&P futures were traded 15 minutes before Trump announced he was in talks with Iran, and the fact that we likely won't see any retribution because Trump has essentially gutted the SEC, the agency whose job it is to go after these crimes. We've discussed all of this. But I think we should also just take a moment to put

this specific insider trading scandal into context and acknowledge the fact that actually this isn't the only one we've seen. No, we have seen plenty of other insider trading scandals during this administration, which Anthony correctly highlighted, but each time it happens, and after we've expressed a little bit of outrage, we seem to forget about it. And then we just move on to the next thing. So let me just remind you of a few of those scandals. Let's start with the tariffs, for example. Most of us were busy worrying about how bad the tariffs would be for the economy and for inflation and for trade relationships. And indeed, we were right. What we forgot about, though, was the fact that millions of dollars were likely being

made by insiders who already knew what Trump's tariff policy was going to be. For example, more than a dozen government officials and congressional aides made big stock market trades before Trump came out with his first Liberation Day announcement. After that, he pulled those tariffs, and he famously tarcoed, but just a few minutes before he did so, we saw once again, a huge spike in S&P options trading, with some trade skyrocketing more than 2,000 percent in a single hour. It was one of the largest jumps in the S&P's history, and a handful of people mysteriously seemed to know exactly what was about to happen. We also have to mention the insider trading in crypto, the fact that Trump coin netted more than a billion dollars

for 58 anonymous crypto accounts, accounts whose operating. happened to sell at the exact right time, right before millions of Americans lost literally billions of dollars of their own money. The same thing happened with Melania coin. The same thing happened with World Liberty Financial. In fact, Eric Trump is now bragging about how much money his family made off of these crypto grifts. But I'm not done yet. We could also talk about the billions of dollars Jared Kushner raised from foreign governments to invest in Middle Eastern assets before he personally steered us into war with Iran, as was literally admitted by Trump himself. We could also talk about the millions of dollars the Trump kids invested in defense companies

and drone startups, again, before we decided to go to war in the Middle East. We could also talk about the Whitkoff children who have been personally brokering real estate deals in the Middle East while their dad runs the United States foreign policy for the region, or even we could talk about David Satt. who continues to invest in AI companies through his VC firm while he simultaneously runs our AI policy for the entire nation. I could go on and on here. This is just scratching the surface.

And as I explained yesterday and as Anthony explained too, this is only going to continue because the SEC and the DOJ and even the FBI have decided they don't want to do anything about it. Why? because if they do, they'll probably get punished. Maybe they will get fired. This is a classic case of corruption. This is what happens in Russia. This is what happens in the fictional world of Batman and Gotham. The criminals are now in bed with the cops, which leaves us with one option. We have to vote

them out. But it also leaves Democrats with an interesting opportunity, especially the Democrats who are running for election. And that is, you could make this your platform. You could promise that if you win, you will put every Trump-affiliated insider trader behind bars. In fact, every insider trader for that matter. That could be your campaign. And even better, if you win, you can. You can, could actually follow through with that promise. And you could actually put these people in jail, not because it's performative and not because it got you the votes, but because it is the right thing to do. Billions of dollars have been made off of insider's connections to the president. But the more honest way to put it is that billions of dollars have been stolen by insiders

connected to the president. The grift and corruption is reaching a level here. that is simply untenable. And I think we can all agree it is time we put an end to it. Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donohue and Miel Saverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Profugee Markets from Proffrey Media. If you liked what you heard, Give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson and tune in tomorrow for our conversation with Bill Gurley.

Today's number 77. That's how many people are in Ireland's... I don't know why I said it with an Irish accent. That's super weird. I'll start again.