Anthony Scaramucci

Host Rich Goldberg is joined by SkyBridge managing partner Anthony Scaramucci, who reacts to the doom-and-gloom crypto naysayers, concedes that he could be wrong in his assessment of its merits — and why he thinks he’s not. He also shares some thoughts about what the future holds for his former boss, former President Donald Trump.

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.

Prior to founding SkyBridge in 2005, Scaramucci co-founded investment partnership Oscar Capital Management, which was sold to Neuberger Berman in 2001. Earlier, he worked in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs & Co.In 2022, Scaramucci was ranked #47 in Cointelegraph’s Top 100 Influencers in Crypto and Blockchain. In 2016, he was ranked #85 in Worth Magazine’s Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance. In 2011, he received Ernst & Young’s New York Financial Services “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award.  Anthony is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a board member of the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. He is the author of five books.

Scaramucci served on President Donald J. Trump’s 16-person Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee, and in 2017 briefly served as Chief Strategy Officer of the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank and White House Communications Director.

Scaramucci, a native of Long Island, New York, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.

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  1. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    Okay. I’m still not hearing it. I’m not hearing anything to convince me that cryptocurrencies and the block chain are other than hype.

    Your guest this show is a salesman. When you asked him about his general approach to investing, he started by mentioning how he passed over Amazon in ’99 because the great investor Warren Buffett dissed a Bezos pitch. Then he pointed out that $10K invested then would yield $14M today. Then another story about him missing a chance to get in on Uber because he was skeptical.

    I get the message: jump on the next new thing, even if you think it’s crazy, because otherwise you’ll miss your golden ticket and not make the fortune you can make if you’ll only dive into crypto. That isn’t a reason to get into crypto, it’s a tactic to sell crypto.

    Amazon, Uber, FedEx for that matter, were novel solutions to real problems — all of them, as it happens, having to do with transformation of existing and relatively moribund markets with logically sophisticated, high-service alternatives.

    I don’t see crypto doing that. I have yet to hear a significant value proposition offered for crypto that will interest non-criminal users.

    You asked for use cases, and your guest offered one: You can pay your restaurant bill with it and save the credit card transaction fee. But you can do that with Venmo as well, and for many orders of magnitude less total cost per transaction.

    Blockchain is interesting, but it’s a solution looking for a problem to solve. There are very few problems for which it’s a good solution; for financial transactions it’s an astoundingly bad solution.

    Is it the “future of finance,” as your guest put it? There is no even remotely plausible argument that would support that view. Are we in danger, as this guest and others have said, of falling behind the Chinese and other nations by failing to [do something involving vague hand waving] digital currencies? No one has yet explained what that means.

    (cont’d)

    • #1
  2. Henry Racette Member
    Henry Racette
    @HenryRacette

    (cont’d)

    Your guest called crypto “digital gold.” Think about this for a moment. Imagine that you could create a thousand other elements that were chemically indistinguishable from real gold, that looked like gold, resisted corrosion like gold, was workable like gold, had the same utility as gold — and imagine that each was, individually, exactly as rare as gold. The only catch was that you couldn’t call any of these indistinguishable-from-gold elements “gold.” You had to call them something else: bitgold, neogold, newgold, xgold, whatever. You just couldn’t say “this is the original gold.”

    What would that do, over time, to the value of gold?

    Because that’s the reality of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has its astounding value because it is a brand, not because it has great utility, not because it is guaranteed rare, not because it is technically unique. It has enormous value because it’s a hot speculative investment. I can create a hundred cryptocurrencies exactly like Bitcoin in every respect except name and pedigree. So what gives Bitcoin its value?

    And, if we didn’t have Bitcoin and its insane valuation, how excited would people really be about crypto and the blockchain?

    Your guest referred to “waterfront digital property,” and I immediately thought of one of my favorite films, Glengarry Glen Ross, with the real estate hustlers selling Florida swamp land to poor dupes afraid of missing the deal of a lifetime.

    I don’t doubt that people are getting rich in crypto. I still think it’s a Ponzi scheme.

    Oh, one last thing. Your guest used the term “crypto-skeptic.” I’ve called myself that. But in my opinion crypto hasn’t yet earned the right to the term: it hasn’t yet established a strong enough case to make doubting it a matter of skepticism. It isn’t skepticism to say, again and again, “but what is it good for, and why is a Bitcoin worth so much when an identical neoBitcoin is worth almost nothing?”

    I’ve yet to hear a plausible case for Bitcoin, other than “lots of people are making money, so jump in.”

    • #2
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