Join Anthony Scaramucci and James Lavish in this must-watch Speak Up episode as they uncover why inflation is inevitable and its profound impact on wealth, markets, and the economy. James, co-founder of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, reveals why Bitcoin is emerging as the most powerful store of value, challenging gold, and offering protection against the spiraling U.S. debt, threatening inflation, and widening wealth inequality. Packed with expert insights into government policies, economic trends, and Bitcoin’s long-term potential, this discussion explores the critical challenges shaping the future of money in 2025—and strategies to protect your financial future.
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James Lavish 0:00
The reality is, Anthony, is that every path leads to inflation.
Anthony Scaramucci 0:12
Welcome to speak up with your host, Anthony Scaramucci on the wealthion network. And joining us back for an encore performance is James lavish and so just briefly on James, 30 year relationship with Wall Street as an institutional investor and Risk Manager. But more important, at least for right now, he is the author of The informationist, which is a great name, by the way, I wish I came up with that name James. It’s a newsletter with over 35,000 subscribers. It breaks down intricate financial topics, accessible weekly articles. I read it. I also see your stuff on news, new stack or sub stack, I should say, um, you know, in addition to all of that, you, like me, happen to be a bitcoiner, right? You’re a managing partner of Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, which is a hybrid fund that makes public and private investments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so welcome back, James. All right,
James Lavish 1:09
thank you for having me. I really appreciate job, and
Anthony Scaramucci 1:13
I’m a ratings whore. You’re a rating score, and let’s just call ourselves what we are. And so people like listening to you, Mr. Lavish, so let’s get right into it. What’s your expectation for economic growth and inflation for 2025 where are you?
James Lavish 1:29
Well, I mean, we just got some pretty inflationary numbers. The the jolts report, right? And the IMS, I some services. So I look we let’s
Anthony Scaramucci 1:41
set the scene for people. We’re recording this on Tuesday, January 7. The numbers that came out look tougher on inflation. Economy still heated up, probably higher than what the Fed expected. The Fed probably thought we were going to have a little bit of a recessionary dip. If I’m being brutally honest, I think that there’s a Trump effect going on. People sort of feel like Trump’s coming in, going to deregulate the animal spirits are rising as a result of Trump’s return to the presidency. Am I not reading that correctly, sir, no,
James Lavish 2:13
I think you are reading it correctly. Remember the last time, obviously the market sold off initially, then roared to life when I realized that there was going to be some deregulation, we do expect the Trump effect to take place where there’s kind of two sides to it. There’s that deregulation that will, that will allow smaller companies to be more profitable because of the red tape we both know just how expensive and onerous it is for small companies to operate in this system. It’s just what it is. So that could be helpful. You know, he said drilled baby drill a lot, which would actually be anti inflationary, because energy prices would come down if we had more oil. But, you know, the the the harsh realities, or the just the stark reality is that Trump loves the stock market. You know, he let he points to it every single day of his administration, pretty much, you know, he came out this morning, even with what’s going on. He came out this morning the headline saying that he literally said that rates are too high. So he’s already putting pressure on the Fed, and he’s not even in office yet to lower rates. So, but that’s a lot of not to get our heads around. So let’s go back up to like, 100,000 feet. We’ve got a lot of things going on. We’ve, we have had some inflationary numbers coming through. And I’ll share a chart with you that came from Apollo that you can put up on, on, on the podcast once, once we’re done taping, but it’ll show just and you’ve seen this chart before, Anthony, it’s the it’s that chart that shows the 1970s inflation, how it spiked, it came back down, and then it spiked again. We, you and I lived through it, and, you know, we’re basically on the same exact trajectory as that. The difference is, back in the 70s, you know, that was a lot of that inflation was driven by that oil shock, you know, the the the shock that we had out of the Middle East, that we had that embargo, and the Iran the Iranian conflict, and we, we couldn’t get gas in our cars, you know. So that energy cost was so high, that’s what really caused an inflation spike back then. It’s much different now. The difference now is that we’re running 130% debt to GDP deficits versus 30% back then, right? So, I mean, it’s a huge difference, and we’re seeing that the economy is this fiscally driven. We, you know, we’re running $2 trillion deficits, and that is inflationary. So that’s kind of like the way, way, way up high view of where we are right. So then you look at it, and you kind of drill down, you think, Well, there’s two economies going on. I know of people who are struggling right now. They’re, you know, they’re kind of middle class people who are really struggling with their the discretionary spending is they don’t have discretionary income like they did before, where they could just go out and do things. Things like just for fun, entertainment, so much of their paycheck is being taken up by just rent, you know, food and energy, you know, gas and that kind of stuff that they and especially insurance, has gone through the roof both health and and auto and home insurance. I mean, this stuff is it’s really weighing on that, on that, on that lower demographic. And you can see it because the debt numbers are going straight up, the personal debt numbers and delinquencies are rising. So what’s happening? Why is the economy still look like it’s roaring along? Well, there’s two economies, the economy that’s benefited from the high interest rates is that that high net worth demographic you know over the over the past few years, that in the last four years, Anthony the top 1% has gained over $16 trillion in wealth, and that’s versus the bottom 50% all of them together, gaining 1.8 trillion between all of them. So, I mean, you’ve got this, you’ve got an economy, it’s rocking along. Go out to restaurants. You see, you’ve got an airplanes. You see, people are either charging and just, you know, you only live once YOLO into into this economy, or just hoping it’s for the best, or just the the younger demographic, the younger, younger generations are just giving up on even be able to own a house, so they’re just spending money on experiences. So it’s, it’s a completely different world that we live in right now. And there are two worlds that the economy is operating in, and that’s just reality. So I want to
Anthony Scaramucci 6:35
test something on you, and everything you said is factually accurate, and everything you’ve said is born from real economic data between the tale of two different economies. I want to test something on you historically, as a as an observer of American history, we have periods of time where there’s great consolidation of wealth, and then the government comes in and intervenes. They break up monopolies, they break up trusts. They try to reorganize the social policies. They create things like the GI Bill. They create things like social security to try to equal things out, to provide more, broader based opportunity. But I’m going to say something that I want you to react to is since Citizens United, which is the Supreme Court case that basically said that if you’re rich, you can pour endless amounts of money into political campaigns. Elon Musk, two $70 million for Donald Trump. Big Pharma, dumping big money into these senatorial races, congressional races, big food, let’s put fertilizer in your food. Congress is no problem. Send me the money to get reelected. We’ve got seven companies now that are 28% of the S, p5, 100 in terms of its market capitalization, and the government is no longer on watch for this activity, a result of which now it’s run amuck, and the rich are going to get way, way richer, while the poor are struggling. The government’s supposed to come in. Monopoly power has been a danger since the 1500s both government’s supposed to come in and reset the table. If I’m wrong about that, and you think we should stay where we are and continue on this trajectory. Tell me why, and if I’m right about that, tell me what you think we could do to change
James Lavish 8:18
it. Yeah, no, I think you are right. The system is broken. You know, it’s all about incentives. You nailed it. And I wrote about this in my in my senior thesis at Yale 30 years ago. We need term limits. We need to re we need to reevaluate our political system and realign the incentives. You know, you know, Congressmen shouldn’t be and senators shouldn’t be trading their personal portfolio. Personal portfolios on legislation. That’s about to happen. That’s just absurd, you know, and and they shouldn’t be putting forth bills or legislation that, or, you know, that will protect companies that are getting them re elected. Just absurd. And it happens if both parties, I can’t, I can’t blame either party. But, you know, the the government spending is out of control, and the incentives are just not aligned for to to have a balance of power. It’s just, it’s just what it is. And so you can see exactly what I said, that you’re, what you’re describing to is is part of the Cantillon effect. You know, whoever’s closest to the spigots going to get, going to get the benefit of that expansion of the money supply and the regulatory, you know, framework, and that’s just reality. So my reaction is, yep, we have a broken system, and we need to fix it, and and that’s a that’s going to be a painful thing, in my opinion.
Andrew Brill 9:40
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Anthony Scaramucci 10:22
there’s nobody on watch, though, sir, nobody on watch. So no, no one’s out there saying, hey, the system’s broken. The system’s at its best when lower middle income people feel like they’re getting opportunity, economic opportunity. I know Elon went from 200 billion to 400 billion in the last couple of months, but is it really changing his life? I mean, can’t we figure out a way to spread wealth down to other people? And by the way, I can tell you from my historical observation, if we don’t do it inside the construct of capitalist system, as we’ve been successful doing over the last 250 years, there will be a lunatic that comes in that does it in a socialist way, which would be even more damaging to the country, right? So I don’t know, I don’t know people are not paying attention, but let’s keep going here. Jay Powell doing a good job.
James Lavish 11:13
He’s, I wouldn’t want his job, man, he’s doing it. I mean, like he’s got a really difficult position to be in. Like I said, we the problem he’s facing is that, as he’s been as he raised rates, right? So he was raising rates at a breakneck speed, and we all expected things to start, you know, getting unruly in the in the credit markets. You’ve seen the commercial real estate market. It’s got some black holes in it, with especially in the office real estate. Now, some of that should resolve itself, as companies are demanding employees to come back to the office now, but, you know, there are a lot of built there. There are a lot of there’s a lot of debt that’s coming due there, and people expected these high interest rates, and that debt being rolled over is gonna start breaking things, especially with the with those companies that that are kind of down on the double the triple B, uh, ladder, and getting closer to, uh, not being invest investment grade, you know. So it cost them more to borrow. But what happened, as he kept the rates up high, you had trillions of dollars sitting in something called the reverse repo, and that really is just excess money that’s in the markets, that’s just sitting in money markets, and it’s making, you know, four or 5% interest, ad nauseam here and so or in infinum, right? So the problem is that, as he was raising rates, it was, it was still inflationary, because it ended up being that the government is running multi trillion dollar deficits, and we’re going to keep coming back to this, like, this is just the this is the problem everywhere. Is just the sheer amount of debt that’s going into the markets. And so, you know, as as Powell is raising rates, it’s costing the government more. They’re running higher deficits. The higher demographic is making more money. We just said what happened? And you know that inflation caused equities to rise, and inflationary assets like gold and Bitcoin to rise, and so you have this, this wealth effect. And then we haven’t even talked about the housing. Housing market is, is, you know, the housing prices are through the roof and and so you have this effect where that higher demographic is just getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, and things are clicking along because of the massive deficits that we’re running. And so again, it’s fiscally driven. And you’re, you know, Powell is trying to do, do what he can, but the realization this last fall was that a lot of that expansion and that growth in the in the in the economy was driven by government hiring. And so you’re seeing the the that private hiring kind of dip down, the government hiring is, is has accelerated. And so he was looking at that, that employment data, right? So let’s, let’s go back to, you know, just, just to break it apart for your listeners, the Fed has two mandates. They have their first mandate is stable pricing. That’s, that’s what it’s called. Stable pricing is what they, what they call that, what they, what they say that is, there’s a constant. 2% inflation is the target they want. 2% inflation. Why that is, there’s no good reason. You know, people have speculated many times about this, but when asked about it on 60 minutes one year ago, Jay Powell was asked this exact question, why? 2% What’s that magic number? And he went into some word solid answer about, you know, the the real rate, or the the the r square, our star rate, and, you know, the Nutri rate. And the reality is, his answer was, it’s just the way it’s been done all along. That’s. Pointed to, he said that in testimony, once it’s just the way it’s always been done, and it’s a standard around the world. But the reality is, that’s what they can get away with. They can get away with the expansion of money supply that creates what they call 2% or more inflation, you know. But if it gets too high, then people get unruly and they get frustrated, like they did over the last couple of years. But if it stays around 2% people don’t really notice it. So anyways, that’s stable price. That’s our first mandate, stable price. And the second mandate is full employment. What full employment is that’s hard to say. You know that we have a fluctuating both economy and, you know, population, so we don’t know exactly what the workforce is at any given moment. It does move around, but the definition that they point to is it’s basically they want to make sure that the unemployment rate doesn’t rise too fast, because that is what signals an oncoming recession, or that one has already started and and again. You know this, Anthony, but I’ll break it apart for your your listeners. What happened this last fall was that the the Fed felt like, well, inflation come down under 4% it was down somewhere around three to two and a half, three and a half to two and a half percent, depending on which which measure you’re looking at. And they felt like it’s decelerating enough that it was going to come down to 2% target. They could stop worrying about that, that part of the equation. Then they started looking at the unemployment and employ unemployment was ticking up. And to simplify it for your your listeners, the what they were looking at is something called the psalm rule. It was created by Claudia som, who was in the Fed years ago. She was in the Brookings Institute. She went to the Fed or went back, either way that she’s, she’s, she created this measure that basically said, again, I’m going to simplify it. The math is a little bit more complicated. Want to simplify it that you look at the unemployment over the last year, and you look at where it got down to the bottom, and then you take that number, and you compare where unemployment is over the last few months, and if over the last few months, it’s more than a half a percent higher than that bottom the lowest unemployment rate, then the SOM rule is tripped, and it means We’re going into recession every single time it’s been tripped, we’ve headed into recession. And it was technically tripped this last fall. Of course, you know there are nuances there. You know when you when you take the the digits and you round them up, that’s when it tripped. If you don’t round them up. Maybe it didn’t trip, but regardless, the Fed and Powell was looking at that, and he said, Okay, now we’re turning to a point where a little bit concerned, we’re gonna start lowering rates, because we don’t want to trip the economy and push the economy into recession. Why would he say that? Well, because he’s really worried. There’s two things that’s been going on, he’s had the rates high, which has made the interest expense for the US government, for the US Treasury, to deal with. It got up over a trillion dollars annually, and because interest rates are over, we’re over 5% and so he wants to back those off. It’s not he. He has said he doesn’t do the Treasury’s job. That’s not his, that it’s not his problem, although, if there’s a problem with the Treasury becomes his problem, which we’ve seen before. So he’s thinking about that, and he’s also thinking that, you know, he doesn’t, he doesn’t want to trip the economy into recession, because he’ll just cause the expenses for the government to go higher because of unemployment and and all the mandatory expenses, you know, social all the social services expenses would go up, and your revenues will go down. Your tax revenues would go down if we go into recession. So the last thing we want to do is go into recession. He knows that. So he’s, he’s a little bit, I think he was just trying to get ahead of it and use the data he had, which is lagging, and it’s hard. It’s just there’s a lot of noise in there. So again, I would not want to be Powell, but that’s getting into his head. That’s kind of what he’s thinking. He just wants to avoid the recession, see if we can engineer that soft landing. And you know, as of today, it looks like he’s done a pretty good job, considering the difficult position he’s in. You know, they, they should probably now that’s over the last year. But let’s go back further, when they opened up the money bazooka and splashed liquidity into the markets in in the near panic in 2020, to 2022, and printed $5 trillion that’s why we’re here. We printed too much money. That was his mistake, and he’s trying to undo it.
Anthony Scaramucci 19:47
Okay, so, so I think it’s a brilliant rendition of what’s going on, which is why I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I now want to play act with you. Want to, yeah, play act with you. You’re the president united states. Your hair isn’t quite orange enough. You’re not wearing enough bronzer, but you’re the president, and I’m getting and you’re walking in your experienced guy, because you’ve been president before, and I’m sitting with you in the Oval Office, and I say to you, Hey, we got a real problem. We have a structural problem going on in this country that is not going to end well. We’ve we started in 2008 we had $7 trillion of debt. So that was George Washington, the George W Bush. Now we have $36 trillion of debt. We’ve amassed that number. It’s been exponential movement in 16 years. We went from seven to 36 trillion. Uh, yes, the economy’s grown. But the percentage of this overall debt that the country has is a great percentage of our GDP. Now it’s worrisome to all of us here, and if it goes exponential, we’re going to have to monetize it. Continually monetize it. There’ll be tremendous amounts of inflation, tremendous amounts of middle and lower class anxiety. The rich will get very rich. Poor will get very poor. It’s going to cause a political nightmare for our system. Be too much stress on our system. So am I right with that analysis? Now you’re James lavish, am I right about that analysis? And if you were the president united states, what if anything could you do about that analysis?
James Lavish 21:20
You got two paths you can go. Path that’s extremely painful, allow us to go into recession, allowed all risk assets to be repriced and and for, you know, for us to just weather that storm that’s not, that’s not a path that anybody wants to take. You know, the more the the the one that we will take, regardless of who’s in office, whether it’s, you know, somebody with with skin much more orange in mind. But the the reality is, Anthony, is that every path leads to inflation, what what they will what they will allow. And I’ve been saying this for years. You know, I wrote a piece called the debt spiral, which actually kind of kicked me off in this world here. And that was two years ago, and the debt was at 31 trillion. It’s up 5 trillion since then. And so the problem is that we’re in this situation where you we’re, we’re paying, we’re the debt spiral. You know is it’s pretty simple. You’ve got, you’ve got the the amount of money that we that we have to spend mandatory. It’s, it’s it the government has to spend this because it’s, it’s written into law, it’s in legislation. It’s over $4 trillion we’ll call it $4.1 trillion as of 24 okay? And that’s Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs. Then you’ve got the your defense spending, which is about $900 billion like which is not mandatory, but there nobody’s going to stop that spending, right? So it’s about $5 trillion right there. You know, we only took in $4.9 trillion of tax revenues. So you’re already over, and then you add in the interest on your debt, the net interest, because they’re inter government debt, it’s about 900 billion. Well, now you’re over, you know, you’re you’re all, all the way up at $6 trillion basically. And you only made 4.9 then you haven’t even talked about all the discretionary spending these programs that are not signed into legislation, but they’re, you know, they get renewed annually. Some of them do, some of them don’t, and they just get replaced with other things. It’s the pork that’s in the in the bills, and you get to another trillion dollars of discretionary spending. So, you know, you’re at $7 trillion so, but the issue here is, you bet, even if you get rid of all of that, you’re, you’re you have to borrow money to pay the interest on your debt. You have to borrow money to pay that. You know, the the debt that’s maturing, we don’t have, we don’t make enough money to pay the debt that’s maturing. So you basically have, you have, you have three options. You can either usher in austerity, which we’ve heard these guys talk about, the doge commission. You know, they’re going to come in, they’re going to slash 75% of government agencies, and they’re just going to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of expenses. Okay, great. Where are you going to Where are you going to slash it from? Are you going to cut Social Security? Are you just going to cut a lot of the administration? How much can you really save by cutting administrative expenses? You know, even if you cut 75% of the workforce, you’re only talking about a few 100 billion dollars. You’re not even, you’re not even getting there. So we’re in a situation where austerity won’t even work. Number one. Number two, it’s kind of, you know, political suicide. Nobody wants to cut expenses. And what you laid out in the beginning of the show is that which Senator and Congressman is going to want to want to go vote for cutting out some of the, you know. Some of the favors that they’ve got in there that are getting them re elected. They’re, they’re gonna get it’s they’re gearing up for a big fight. That’s reality. Okay, that’s number one. Number two, you could raise taxes. You remember the laugher curve and and the the fact, the fact that you can raise taxes up to a certain point, but then above a certain point, it actually starts hurting the economy, and you and you end up getting less tax revenue because you’ve raised the taxes too high. Companies go offshore. They try, they do things to avoid taxes, or they just stop, you know, doing things that will help their productivity. And in the end, it actually, you know, hinders productivity, because companies aren’t spending money on R D, they aren’t reinvesting in productive product lines. Aren’t expanding it to new product lines aren’t hiring people. So that doesn’t really work. You can only raise taxes to a certain point, and then it doesn’t work anymore. And what that point is, it’s hard to say, but you know, it’s it. We’re probably not too far off it. So that’s the second thing. The third thing you can do, which is what we’ve been doing all along. It’s just issue more debt. You issue more debt and borrow more money. And so that’s what we’re going to continue doing. However, this goes back to your point, which is that requires inflation. So why does it require inflation? It requires inflation because you must get nominal GDP up higher, raise a nominal GDP that’s non that’s that. That doesn’t count inflation, right? So nominal GDP is just the dollars that are being earned. Pump money into the system, make more dollars, create higher earnings for those companies, even if it goes mostly to the upper class, and then that will give you a higher tax base to tax that you’ll get more dollars on taxes to pay off debt that you that you issued, you borrowed that money years ago. So it’s like, if I borrow $100 from you today, right? And I’m gonna there’s gonna be inflation, and in 10 years from now, I give you that $100 back. Who made out on that deal? Likely me, depending on what I did with that $100 but you know you’re you now are going to get basically 50 bucks back, right? So
Speaker 1 27:10
paying back dollars with dollars that are worth less? Yeah, exactly correct. So that’s exactly
James Lavish 27:15
what we’re going to do. And I think that, I think Trump, he inherently understands that. He knows that inflation is going to help solve the problem, even if it’s painful for a lot of people. Yeah, it’s
Anthony Scaramucci 27:27
going to hurt middle income people. It always hurts them the worst, you know, but always. The weird thing about all this is that we, some of us, ridicule the modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton, she wrote a book called The deficit myth, explaining that you can just print money forever. And we ridiculed her. But yet we are all modern monetary theorists. Okay, so you know when you remember when Mr. Nixon, President Nixon, he took us off the gold standard, which obviously touched on 71 inflation shock, yeah, yeah, he said that we’re all Keynesians, but it’s now 2024 we’re all, MMT people, whether we like to admit that or not, because that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing forced
James Lavish 28:09
to we’re forced to do, I want inflation. No, I don’t. I don’t. It’s terrible. It’s awful. I fight against it every day. I talk about it every day. I talk about how terrible it is every day, on on Twitter and in my newsletters every week, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s it. The lower class bears that burden, yeah, and it’s disproportionate level.
Anthony Scaramucci 28:31
This is why bitcoins going up. So what? Let’s go to the outside questions, James, because we got a lot of them for you. You’re, you’re a popular human being. You’re not orange and you got hair on your face. You know, Trump doesn’t like that either, by the way, but you are a popular human being. So let’s go to the questions, yeah, Anthony and James, what is the most important financial lesson you’ve learned during your career that you think everyone should know? Okay, that’s mark from Canada. So I’ll go first. Okay, I tell everybody mark from Canada that get long the market and buy the market monthly. That’s what I’ve done since 1989 I have bought the market monthly with a small piece of my income. It has served me well. It’ll serve you well, and that takes out all the noise and distractions. Just be disciplined and do that. James, what say you I’m going
James Lavish 29:21
to say the exact same thing when I build on it. And the reason is that you see the CPI number, these inflation numbers that the that the BLS reports and that the Fed points to, and they say it’s about two, 3% don’t believe it real. Inflation is the expansion of the money supply, and that’s been somewhere between 6.971 7.1% since the Nixon shock, depending on how you look at it, but just call it 7% so you need to be making, on average, more than 7% annually in order to keep up with inflation. So the last thing you want to do is take your money, put it in a checking account and not get any interest on it, because you. You know, JP, Morgan, Chase wells, Fargo and and Bank of America are taking that interest from themselves and not passing on along to you. You need to keep up with the expansion of the money supply. That’s just reality. Okay,
Anthony Scaramucci 30:13
let’s go to the next question. Very well said. How do you think blockchain, beyond cryptocurrency, will revolutionize industries? This is Liam from the UK. I’ll let you handle that one. James,
James Lavish 30:24
yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s so many ways that this can, this can transform industries. You know, we were, we’re seeing right now that with Bitcoin in particular, there’s, there’s now this new way to store value, and it’s becoming, you know, effectively, it’s taking market share away from gold, and I think it will do that, will continue to do that over the course of a number of years. But the reason for that is that it’s, it’s trustless. And so what? What you have to know about crypto currencies and and the different ones there, there are some that will have utility. That’s reality. There will be some utility there. And so the what is revolutionary to me about it, especially with Bitcoin, is that trustless nature, where you have this immutable blockchain that cannot be it cannot be altered, and that all the incentives are aligned. They’re aligned in order to keep that, in order to keep that, that chain unbroken, and so you can trust that, without having to trust anybody else on the other side of the transaction. And that’s really important. What we saw back in, back in 1998 and back in 2008 is that counterparty risk was massive, and so just at the base level, not having to have counterparty risk on on any whether it’s monetary, financial, whether it’s insurance, whether it’s whether it’s, you know, deeds to houses, whatever it may be that having a trusted blockchain is something that we’ve never had in pretty much the history of the world. We’ve always been on a ledger that we have to trust people to keep that ledger and trust that that centralized ledger is correct. But not having that is a really big deal. It’s going to transform industries in ways that we can’t even imagine.
Anthony Scaramucci 32:19
Go to the next one. What role do you believe Bitcoin will play in the long term future of global finance? So it’s a little bit similar to the other question. This is Alicia from from Florida, yeah.
James Lavish 32:31
So Bitcoin is a long way to go. So even though we were talking about it, and even though it’s a it’s an asset that’s worth about $2 trillion now, you know, it’s only a tiny fraction. It’s like point two three or point two 5% of total global investable assets around the world, and which are about 900 trillion. So how is it going to change? Well, what happens is, as people recognize Bitcoin as a separate investable asset class, institutions are understanding it. There’s a massive amount of tailwinds behind it right now, which is exactly why we started the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, because we see all the opportunity that’s in there in this ecosystem. Why is that? Well, right now it’s, it’s, it’s the ultimate store of value, in our opinion, and it will grow to be the ultimate store of value in the world, in our opinion, and and again, for the reasons I stated before. But the reality is, right now, it’s, it’s, it’s a digital asset. It’s not money yet. It may became, become money down the, you know, in the future, but it’s not generally accepted everywhere. It’s, you know, it’s a great store of value, but not a means of exchange yet. And so what I believe will happen is that the first thing we will do is it will, it will take a lot of that market share from gold. And it will, it will more than double the, triple the size of gold in in somewhere in the relatively near future, you know, not not years, but certainly in the next decade or so. And the reason for that is that it again, it has, it has properties that are much stronger than gold and and and are much more advantageous to have as a store of value. So that’s part of it. The second part is that as it does grow, and the institutions do adopt it and they put it in their portfolio as a separate asset class, they’re going to start understanding that, wow, I don’t want to hold 1020, 30 year treasuries or some of this corporate debt that’s way out there, that’s way riskier. I’d rather take some of my money and put it in Bitcoin and hedge against that inflation that’s still occurring. Occurring, because the inflation, in my opinion, is only going to continue and could likely get worse for
Speaker 1 35:05
a period of time. So what’s your five year price target on Bitcoin? Well, so
James Lavish 35:09
if we’re in 2025 now 2030 I’d say it’s somewhere between 700 and a million dollars per Bitcoin. So that’s after going through the cycle and coming back down. So
Anthony Scaramucci 35:21
I think that. But why? So, why are people just jumping in there, hand over Fizz, right now, if you could buy an asset right now at six, that’s going to go to 100 wouldn’t you buy that asset? Well, I mean, look that it’s now at 10, that’s going to go to 100 Yeah,
James Lavish 35:41
I think there are people who are waking up to it. There’s, there’s so much misinformation out there about Bitcoin. You know, when you talk to normal people, you and I are in this world every day, and we look at it every day, we talk to people who understand it every day. But if you go out into the world and you ask somebody about Bitcoin, even people in my family, I’ve been talking about it for years, and I guess this is on me, but some people just still don’t understand it. They think, oh yeah, I got some of that Bitcoin. I got the Ethereum one. And so they just don’t really understand the differences. They truly don’t understand it’s hard, it’s hard to wrap your head around. So my buddy
Anthony Scaramucci 36:13
Cliff Asness says that, well, we got computers that are turned on running a mathematical equation, and it’s just a bunch of BUPKIS, and it’ll go to 250 but then by 2030 it’ll be worth 10,000 there’ll be some holdouts that’ll have it worth 10,000 what does he got wrong about that?
James Lavish 36:30
Well, I think he’s got wrong is that the network itself is a lot stronger than he understands, right? So what I like to tell people who are newcomers, is that bitcoins digital property. It’s a superior form of digital gold, right? And it’s it, it’s shown it’s so it can no longer be ignored as store value, right? So we, we’re seeing it happen in real time. So I focus on the trust. I’ve been talking about the trust, and so it Bitcoin is a rapidly growing network, and it’s operated continuously since 2013 it had one hiccup then, but since then, it’s processed over a billion transactions and maintained over 11 years of uninterrupted sir, 12 years of uninterrupted service. So. But why is that? It’s because the network is secured by 175 terawatt hours of power that all those computers that are securing the network. It’s equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors running continuously. So, you know, put simply, the Bitcoin network is a fortress digital of power. It’s nation state level resistant, and is growing stronger every day. So that’s what he’s got. Wrong is people don’t understand that network effect and the strength of the network that’s where it is. And once you do understand that, it clicks for you, then everything else falls into place. Well,
Anthony Scaramucci 37:55
you’ve been incredibly generous with your time, as usual. Mr. James lavish, thank you for joining us on, speak up and going to have you back. Because I think it’s going to be a Thomas interesting year. It’s going to be, I think we end higher at the end of this year, but I think it’s going to be an up and down year, because gonna be a lot of intrigue that goes on here, geopolitical intrigue, interest rate intrigue, etc. But I agree it’s
James Lavish 38:18
going to be, it’s going to be interesting year, and I look forward to coming back. Thank you for having me. Back. Thank you for having
Andrew Brill 38:24
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