Stock Market Crash, ‘Likely Recession’ After April 2 (Uncut) 03-31-2025

Stock Market Crash, ‘Likely Recession’ After April 2 | Anthony Scaramucci

I think the blunt instrument of using the tariffs the way he’s using them is going to cause a crisis in the United States. It’ll be a further decline in the stock market. If the tariff talk persists post a full second, further decline in the stock market, likely recession.

If it gets calmer and it looks more like the 2017-2021 Trump term, Bitcoin will get to $200,000 this year. If you’re telling me we’re going to be in a protracted trade war, maybe it gets back to $100,000, but it’s going to be very hard for Bitcoin to ascend to where I think it could go. We’re at the Digital Asset Summit in New York, and we’re going to be talking about what’s next for cryptocurrencies and the geopolitical landscape.

What’s next for the economy? Anthony Scaramucci joins us today. He is the founder of Skybridge Capital. Very honored to host Anthony.

I’m David Lin, host of the David Lin Report. Bonnie from Bonnie Blockchain. Anthony, so good to see you.

You are so good at this, David. I mean, I try to keep up. Hey, he has a podcast.

The staccato delivery sounds fantastic. Yes. High praise coming from you, Wealthion host and my co-host for this show, Bonnie Blockchain.

She has an awesome channel. But let’s start with some stuff on tariffs. Bonnie, take it away.

We have a lot of audience from Taiwan, from Asia, Chinese speaking region. So in case they’re not familiar with American politics, you were in the White House for 11 days. I got unceremoniously fired after the 11 days.

It was a fun 11 days though, I will say. Right. So how is working with President Trump? I want to ask you about his tariffs.

Working with President Trump on the campaign was actually a lot of fun. I always like to tell people very candidly what it was like. It was a lot of fun.

He’s a jocular guy, garrulous. He has a good sense of humor. He can be very witty.

He’s probably the most famous standup comedian in the world, if you really think about his personality. But when he got to the White House, he got a little bit tighter, a little more imperious, and it became a little less fun. And then if you are arguing with him or you disagree with him, you know, you got pretty much fired very quickly.

And so we argued about a few things. I shortly thereafter got fired. So no hard feelings on that.

I just want to address policy and talk about what I like and what I don’t like. So you want to talk about the tariffs? Yeah. Markets don’t like uncertainty, right? And do you think that’s a bargaining chip? Is he forcing us into a recession? What’s going on? Let’s give the optimistic case first, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what could happen.

But he’s already hurt America in a number of different ways. Because when you start out with that sort of fire and bellicosity and rhetoric, you’re turning people off. You have the mayor of Toronto, as an example.

Now, you can’t bid if you’re an American company on any Toronto-based contract. So it has a chilling effect. If you look at the last three weeks of market activity, European markets are up, U.S. markets are down.

Flow of funds are moving away from the United States. And so as the American president, he sure would want foreign investment capital flowing into the U.S. I think one of the things that has made the U.S. so attractive globally over the last 150 years is we have a stable political system, decentralized system, lots of checks and balances, and a real platform for a predictable rule of law. There’s not arbitrary and capricious law here that you sometimes find in regimes that have less checks and balances.

So I think when the president is acting in that way, it’s scary to people. And I think it sends the wrong message. And Winston Churchill had a great line.

There’s nothing worse than fighting with your allies, except when you have to fight without them, meaning they’re no longer your allies. And so I think it’s dangerous. I don’t like it.

I’m being brutally honest about it. But remember, the best outcome could be it’s a negotiating device. You get to the April 2nd deadline.

They declare victory and say that stuff has been done on the border. Stuff has been done on the Canadian border related to fentanyl. Something’s been done on the Mexican border.

Yeah. Premier Doug Ford wants to cut off electricity. Canada’s fighting back.

He wants to cut off power to the eastern seaboard. What do you think of that? At the end of the day, you were back on American networks. There were some quotes from the inner circle of Trump, more or less declaring this a win yesterday.

So what are your thoughts? Is this a win for Trump? Or how do you back from that? You know, they want to call it a win. Whatever it’s been, they’re playing politics. But here and there, what happened yesterday, very clearly, Secretary Lutnick called me, I didn’t call him, put an olive branch out, and only a foolish person would decline or hang up on someone and say, I’m not listening.

We said, well, that’s fine. We need a meeting and we need it right away. He agreed.

He said, fly down tonight, fly down tomorrow. The next day, we’re bringing Minister LeBlanc with us and Ambassador to have that conversation, to sit down and see what their requirements are, what their needs are. I always say, when you have your largest customer, you listen to your largest customer in business.

And we’ll sit there and listen and make sure that we bring that information back and sit around the table. It’s the federal government that’s leading this, not myself. They’re going to lead the negotiations.

We’ll have a very loud voice in that conversation, along with all the other bringers. Probably a bridge too far. I mean, it could get to that.

I mean, if the president wants to ramp up his rhetoric, it could get to that. I think that the big mistake that President Trump is making is you’re thinking about this in a 1950s sort of way, and we’re in 2025 and we’re 33, 34 years since the signing of NAFTA, and you have fully integrated these two economies. So let me give you two examples.

Example number one, I’m a farmer, lobster farmer. I’ve got lobster farm situation in Maine. I’m catching the lobster in U.S. water, but I’m shipping it to a processor across the border in Canada.

That’s 25% tariff. And then it’s going to come back to me, process, so I’m now going to sell it to the restaurants. That’s another 25% tariff.

So 25% over, 25% back. Price of lobster is 50%. You’re going to bankrupt the lobster farmer.

The crude in Alberta is a heavy crude. Most of the refineries that are south of the Canadian border in the United States are set up to refine that crude. If you’re telling me that the Alberta premier is going to start shipping that crude to China, Taiwan, you pick the area of the world it’s going to ship it to, or you’re going to have to retool all the refineries in the United States.

And so the president’s making a mistake because these countries are now fully integrated. So his staff is now trying to get to him and say, okay, you should probably cool out on this sort of velocity of rhetoric. And we should get to whatever you don’t like in the USMCA deal.

And the big irony there, guys, is that he negotiated that deal. And he said in 2019, this was the greatest trade deal in history, the USMCA. So if you don’t like the deal now, six years later, let’s go through the deal surgically and pick out the things that you don’t like.

And let’s see if we can make it better for the United States and acceptable to Canada. But I think the blunt instrument of using the tariffs the way he’s using them is going to cause a crisis in the United States. It’ll be a further decline in the stock market.

If the tariff talk persists post April 2nd, further decline in the stock market, likely recession, and a further detachment from our more traditional allies, which even our adversaries in the world will not like because it creates more unpredictability in the world. Before we continue with the video, let me tell you about a very serious problem that’s affecting a lot of people, data breaches. Now, every day, data breaches of all kinds happen.

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Go to joindelete.me.com and use promo code davidlin at checkout or scan the QR code on the screen here to get 20% off and protect your privacy today. I’m going to come back to what you just said because Scott had a quote, but I think we want to talk about just finishing off the trade wars, talk about how it affects Taiwan and the Asia region. So Trump called TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor, the most powerful company.

And in March, we see that he announced that TSMC is going to invest $100 billion in the US, Arizona. And that worried a lot of people because it kind of compromised the silicone shield of Taiwan, right? What is your thought? Well, this could be a contrary thought. I think that long-term thinking would suggest that you need more stability and you need more peace, which will create greater prosperity.

And I think if you look at mainland China’s economy right now, that economy needs to heal and possibly reset and restart its growth. It has languished for a few years if you just look at the data. Again, that’s the Chinese government’s data, and that could be understated or overstated, but I’m just going off of their data.

The economy is not doing as well as they would like it to be. So it’s not clear to me that the quote unquote silicone shield is in play at this moment. If you take the argument that the president wants a multipolar world where Xi is controlling a part of the world and Putin is controlling a part of the world, and let’s say Trump is controlling North America, which in his mind would include things like Canada and Greenland and possibly the Panama Canal.

And you’re laughing, Bonnie, because this is an absurdity to what he’s talking about, because this is like 18th century Prussian colonialism, which isn’t really appropriate for the 21st century. So to me, when I step back and look at the landscape of the world, I don’t think it’s in the interest of the mainland Chinese government, the Communist Party there to upset the core stability of what’s going on in the world, particularly when they’re under economic stress. And so I think whether people realize this or not, the United States has to reshore some of its manufacturing.

The United States has to reshore a lot of their ship manufacturing, frankly, because it’s too big of a core component to the economy. And 25 years ago, when we were lovey-dovey with China, and we helped China get into the World Trade Organization, we thought we were moving towards some level of singularity and some level of a more integrated system of like and trust with each other, more harmony, more peace. Remember, the U.S. mantra for the post-World War II order was raise living standards around the world.

And if you raise living standards around the world, you have less geopolitical conflict. What was left out of that is that there’s still an ideological struggle going on in the world. And as long as that ideological struggle is going on, there will be a threat.

And so the U.S. has to protect itself by reshoring some things. So I want to get your prediction on Bitcoin price. How do you think Bitcoin will do 2025, 2026? I mean, you know, Bitcoin is being held back right now by the macro dilemma that we’re facing.

You know, I think people were expecting that President Trump would be pro-business and he’d pro-growth for the stock market. I don’t think they were anticipating these sort of starts and stops with the tariffs and this level of uncertainty. And so if it gets calmer and it looks more like the 2017, 2021 Trump term, Bitcoin will get to 200,000 this year.

If you’re telling me we’re going to be in a protracted trade war and we’re going to be fighting with our European and Western allies, you know, Bitcoin will probably hover near here, maybe gets back to 100,000. But it’s going to be very hard for Bitcoin to ascend to where I think it could go if we were just in a more normal environment. Normal being proper intersection between government and finance.

Just on that note, so you said earlier we might get a recession. So this is Scott Sands’ quote, Treasury Secretary. What I could guarantee is we would have had a financial crisis.

I’ve studied it. I’ve taught it. And if we had kept up those spending levels that everyone knows was unsustainable, we are resetting and we are putting things on a sustainable path.

That’s what he’s talking about for the future. If he’s right and this debt level rise is not sustainable, what happens to Bitcoin? What happens to risk assets? Well, long term, Bitcoin is going to be OK. I think the question was, what’s Bitcoin going to look like at the end of the year? And it really depends on the administration, in my opinion.

If they calm down, Bitcoin will go to 200,000. Long term, over five years, Bitcoin will be several hundred thousand because the money printers turned on not only here in the United States, but around the world. And people will start gravitating to Bitcoin because of the properties associated with Bitcoin.

And we and many people in our industry believe it’s a store of value. And I think other people will draw that conclusion as they start to see these metaphors. But I think what the secretary is saying is true.

You can’t go from four and a half trillion dollars of spending and six short years later, you’re at seven trillion on your way to nine trillion and say that that’s sustainable. Just the math isn’t going to work for the United States. And you’ll force more extreme politics into the country because you’re not going to pay the debt back.

Let’s just be honest with everybody. You’re going to monetize that debt. And so what you’ll do is if you create 8% inflation in the country, which we had in 2023, well, you just wiped out 8% of the country’s debt.

You can have it nominally, but it’s worth less. And so to me, the right thing to do is to get the country on a more sustainable path. But the wrong thing to do is to push the country into austerity.

If you push the country into austerity, you’ll touch off negative thinking in the country and you’ll touch off a negative vicious flywheel that will lead to deconsumption and lead to a recession. So this is gradualism. Governments have to think, let’s steal something from the Chinese for a second.

The U.S. government has to think in 10, 15, 20, possibly 25-year movements. We don’t have a Project 2049, but we need one. And so what is that project? How do we look over the next 15 years? You can manage the deficit and you could reduce the deficit as a percentage of GDP, and you could do it gradually, which wouldn’t cause recessionary or austerity-like pain.

So the problem is you’re dealing with the president. And so Scott If Scott was dealing with a more rational political leader, less self-absorbed, you’d be able to sit down with him and say, okay, here’s what we need to do. Return to pay-as-you-go legislation, which worked in the 1990s.

Benchmark with our colleagues in the Congress certain levels of spending and this continuing resolution that’s taken place for almost 13 years now in the government. And you can get things right-sized and the markets would be very satisfied with that. No one’s suggesting that the current spending should grow and get out of control.

But there’s a methodology to slowing down the spending that won’t overly hurt the economy, the markets, or lower middle-income people. But I’m not going to get a lot of attention if I’m President Trump saying all that. It’s more interesting and it’s more addictive to go on and off with the tariffs and get a lot of news attention and have these sorts of microphones in my face in the Oval Office all day.

How is SkyBridge adjusting the portfolio after the Bitcoin results? So SkyBridge has had a couple of very good years. I’m not allowed to talk about the performance because we’re registered, but I’ll just say this. If Bitcoin went from $16,000 in January of 2023 to let’s call it $80,000 and SkyBridge had a 25-ish percent position in its overall portfolio in Bitcoin, you’d have to imagine that we’ve had a couple of really good performance years.

And so what I said from the stage here at DAS, and I’ll say to you guys, I would say it globally, is that we’re going to hold our Bitcoin position and possibly even expand our Bitcoin position. And I’ll take the position that Bitcoin may muddle a little bit this year because of the metadata and the macro economic forces, but I think it’s probably a 5X in five years. And so I’m going to hold that asset and I think we’re going to get rewarded for that.

Now, will there be volatility? Sure. But I think as I’ve gotten older, I realized that the smartest people don’t churn a lot. They just sit tight in really good assets.

I think that’s what SkyBridge is going to do over the next five years. Are you hedging against volatility? I’m not. Okay.

I’m not. Are you still buying at this price? We are. Okay.

I just bought some recently at this price. I think we’ll wrap up with a few questions about you, Anthony. Yeah.

The audience wants to learn about you and your journey to success. I was six foot four when I met Donald Trump. And look at me now.

That’s what we’ll start with. Go ahead, Bonnie. Well, I was preparing for this interview and I watched one of your interviews.

You said you are from a middle class family and your dad was a crane operator and you’re super mega successful right now. If you could go back and meet your younger self, what would you say to him? Well, you know, listen, look, it’s a great question, but I think that the one thing that you really have to do philosophically in life is not look back. I think what sometimes happens and the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, if I look back, you can sometimes think about things that you made mistakes in.

You can fill your mind with regret. You become depressed. If you look forward, you could get anxious about the future because the future is uncertain.

We don’t know what’s coming. And so the best thing you could do is live in the present. But what I what I would say to you guys is if I could look back, I would get on the phone with myself or get face to face with myself and I’d grab myself by the collar, Bonnie.

And I’d say, take more risk, be more confident, be more sure of yourself, because when you grow up the way I did, you’re you’re born with some inherent insecurities related to the corporate environment. You know, my dad was a blue collar worker. I never saw the inside of a country club, never hit a golf ball, never swung a tennis racket, never saw a building like this when I was a kid or been in a commercial office building.

And so it is daunting and it is intimidating because you have to make that transition. It’s almost like a rite of passage. I think I would tell my younger self to be way more confident than I actually was.

And so it’s OK to be confident. It doesn’t mean to be arrogant, but you can it’s OK to believe in yourself. Well, you’re one of the most confident, successful people we know, Anthony.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Pleasure. You really have a line on you.

I mean, I’ve never seen so funny. This is so impressive. Are you not are you not impressed with this? I am.

The way he slicked this out of he slicked this out of the interview. It’s really good. Thank you.