Hello, good to everyone. Let's get into it.
I've got two very lively gentlemen who do not lack
personality.
I'm trying to turn it down for at least the
1st 5 minutes and leave the partisan hats off and
just tell us a down the middle take on what
a Biden re election would mean for the economy and
what a Trump re election would mean for the economy.
OK. All
right, Go ahead, Andrew. We know what you think of.
I'm very happy to.
So I I'm in the camp that thinks Trump would
be a catastrophe
as our president. Again, he's learned from his mistakes last
time,
which is hiring responsible adults who sometimes
tamp down his policy desires and instincts.
I unfortunately think he's the favorite to win.
I think if the election was held today,
he would win. And the question is whether something changes
over the next six months.
One of the things that's under reported,
folks, is that Biden's main advantage is money.
But they've spent $35 million in the swing states trying
to boost his numbers,
and it has had no impact,
which augurs very, very poorly
for the fact that money is going to swing the
approximately 7%
of genuine swing voters in those states.
So right now, my projection would be Trump wins.
Some very, very bad things happen
administratively and institutionally, but the effect on the economy would
be unclear.
So I think the superficial analysis,
particularly from people on Wall Street,
Trump's better for the economy.
And then they list all these policy things that he
would do that would be better for the economy.
But I think he would be
terrible for the economy and terrible for the country.
And I'll tell a quick story.
And this happened in the White House and it happened
on a Wednesday.
The reason I know what happened on a Wednesday,
I was only there for one Wednesday.
So I know, I know what happened on a Wednesday.
And it was him and Paul Ryan,
and they're bigger than me.
And they were fighting in the Oval Office and
and Trump was putting his finger on Paul and he
was saying,
you work for me, you work for me.
Paul's looking at him like I,
I don't work for you.
I'm in a totally separate article of the Constitution.
I don't work for you.
And Trump was looking over at me.
He's like, is he right?
He doesn't work for me.
I'm like, no, he doesn't work for you.
And Trump doesn't like that.
And the people in this room that really understand the
Constitution is what has made this economy.
The predictability of the laws,
the separation of the powers,
the inability to create an autocracy in the country for
the last
250 years has protected your businesses because
the sanctity of these laws allow for the free flow
of capital.
And people own their property in this country.
It's backed up by the court system.
And there's 900 years of legal precedent.
Mr. Trump doesn't like any of this.
And he's an orange Wrecking Ball for this society.
And he's going to come in with a group of
people that believe in something called unitary executive power.
And if you don't know what that means,
you should Google it somewhere tonight.
And you should understand what the Heritage Foundation believes and
what Mr.
Trump believes, that they want to expand and knock out
the other two branches
and make him Uber powerful.
And when that happens, you get what happens in every
other autocracy,
a really bad system and a lack of predictability in
the laws.
So yes, superficially he sounds better for the economy,
but he's a disaster for the economy.
He's a disaster for the world,
and he's a disaster for your business.
And you got to be really careful.
Can I just say one last thing?
There are forty of us
that are speaking out against them.
One of them was on the ballot with them last
year or two.
Four years ago, the president
picked a guy named Mike Pence.
Anybody remember him? He was the vice president,
OK? They were, they were,
they were, they were chanting kill Mike Pence on the
6th of January in
2021. You know, Mike Pence said,
you know, I've had enough of this,
OK? And under no circumstances will I endorse or support
Donald J Trump.
There are 39 other people that have said the exact
same thing.
I submit to everybody here rhetorically,
Let's say all of us work for a car company
and we said,
hey, this car sucks and they didn't build it right.
It's going to kill your family.
Or we we work for an auto
airline manufacturer. So this planes going to fall out of
the sky or we work for a drug company said
the drugs going to kill you.
What is going on in this country where you have
super smart,
very patriotic people, guys like General Kelly,
who are not even partisan?
OK, Anthony, I got to cut you off.
I think we get it.
And I think, you know,
for the record, I, I,
I agree. If the institutions held last time,
I don't know if the central bank and so on
would hold this time,
but we might find out.
Let's switch it to Biden.
I mean, he's got a plan.
He's got a plan to end the central bank,
by the way, I've heard of that.
Let let's let's go to Joe Biden for a SEC.
I mean, I think I was really just getting started,
by the way, just saying
it's getting warmed up. All right,
go ahead, go ahead. Claire.
You think Biden is better?
But do you think there would be any economic pivots?
Would you know, Elizabeth Warren still be running hurt over
the financial markets?
What would be different? It would be more of the
same.
Go for dinner. No, no,
it would depend upon what happens to the House and
the Senate.
I mean, projections are Republicans take the Senate
and then the the House is
going to be pretty evenly split.
But a lot of Biden's policies have yet to be
fully implemented.
I mean, they authorized $1.2 trillion
of which just came out that maybe 18%
of it's been spent or committed or allocated so
that they bit off a,
a giant chunk and then they're still trying to figure
out how to chew it.
So if if you have a second Biden administration,
then the other 80, some odd percent of that gets
deployed and spent in various ways.
If Trump comes in, then Trump will probably try and
pull that back.
So I, I don't imagine any
whipsawing in terms of economic policy
depending upon who controls the legislative branches.
And I do want to say to you all,
if you want to read more about
Anthony's 10 or 11 days
as comms director, he has a book out this week
that goes in and and don't,
don't hurt my friend Andrew.
We're good friends. Don't hurt my feelings.
It was 11 days. Don't chip me out of that
last day.
It's a big day. I got I got fired in
that last day.
It was a big day.
I had like a 10%
cock. Anthony, how do you feel?
It's it's actually become like a,
a noun, a short, a very short 10 years now
is Scaramucci of work.
Like
I think it's great. You know,
listen, when the only problem is people are very sensitive.
OK, I, I tweeted out that Liz Trust lasted
4.1 Scaramucci's approximately 45 that she got very upset.
OK, I, I tweeted out that Kevin McCarthy lasted
24 1/2. Scaramucci as speaker
guy got very upset. I mean,
these people, a bunch of babies.
Just relax.
We've got all the big topics.
I got to go granular for a second.
Carried interest loophole. You have a hedge fund,
right, Anthony? And you get that,
that, that very favorable tax break.
And every every couple years they're going to repeal it
because who doesn't want to take money away from the
hedge fund guys and have you guys pay lower taxes
than the rest of us?
Is that you see that being repealed anytime is that
for me,
I'm going to channel David Rubenstein.
He said God has ordained that was the 11th commandment
on the tablets that we're going to keep the carried
interest loophole.
I, I pay 50. I don't know about you guys,
but I live here in New York.
I pay 52% marginal tax.
I'm a minority partner in my own life now.
So the dollar comes in
50-2 cents, goes to Eric Adams,
Kathy Hochul and Joe Biden.
I get to keep $0.48 for my family.
I am totally fine with that.
If they want to end the carried interest loophole,
if that's going to benefit the society,
I'm totally fine with that.
OK, We have a huge disparity in the society right
now
and I don't want to be a rich guy living
in a barbed wire security MC mansion
while my fellow neighbors are suffering.
So me personally, I have never complained about my taxes,
don't mind paying them. I would love to audit the
city or the state
and see where the taxes have gone because it doesn't
make sense that we have
the budgets that we have and we have services.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like spending.
That's why he was my guy from mayor.
Didn't work out. Yeah, man,
I would have been happy to open the books.
Those
would have been good times.
And they wouldn't want somebody like Andrew to open the
books because,
you know, come on, it's bad,
$2 trillion, they can't find $2 trillion.
Come on. So I, I,
I wanted to comment on the dynamics of the economy.
So you, you have capital on one side,
then you have technology on the other.
And they're commingling to accelerate the most extreme winner take
all economy in the history of the world.
And the and so you can
take shots at addressing some of these
inequities, but the inequities are getting more powerful and faster
all the time.
One thing I joke about
is that AI is getting faster and smarter and we
are lucky not to get slower and or Dumber in
any given day.
Like if we stayed the same,
it was a good day you know what I mean?
But then if if you extrapolate that society wide,
we're going to displace millions and millions of workers.
And even now major corporations are cutting
high-priced employees because they're figuring out wait a minute,
I'm paying you 200, I can pay this person
75 and stacking AI on top of them and voila.
Or it's like, I can replace.
I mean, there are two million Americans who work at
call centre still.
When will AI replace them
now? What day of the week is it?
People are like, oh, it's Tuesday,
they'll get around, do it by Friday.
So there are all of these trends that are speeding
up.
And the question is, what does the,
the real economy of the future look like if you're
trying to prioritize human values in an era where we're
going to lose in epic fashion to the machines and
all of the people like,
oh, we're going to, you know,
work with the AI, we're going,
we're going to reskill people.
It it's generally
wishful thinking slash nonsense slash good for the,
the press release. And then you,
you go back and actually,
you know, do what you're going to do within your
organization.
So the reason why I've been pro
crypto this entire time is that in my opinion,
the only way out of this is to create a
multivariate economy that rewards various human activities independent of whether
it's actually capitally
efficient if you measure it in just one axis,
which is the monetary axis.
So imagine a currency that was rewarding arts and creativity,
and then another one that was
for nurturing and caring and education,
then another one that was for health and Wellness.
And you had millions of people pursuing each of these
activities.
That to me was the promise of crypto currencies.
And it has failed. It has failed because what crypto
has primarily been used for.
And you know, I'm, I'm still pushing in this direction
because it's necessary,
but it's failed because it's primarily being used as an
engine of financial speculation and as a hedge to collapsing
confidence in Fiat currencies.
And that's a use, you know,
you know, like congratulations, but it's not addressing any of
the big picture issues that in my mind are just
speeding up all the time.
So we're here about future of finance at the 24
election.
To me, that has to be the vision of the
economy that we're moving towards as quickly as possible.
Yeah. Anthony, I'd like to ask you with that.
AI has come up a lot today.
It's coming up everywhere. What do we do with this
risk of a whole bunch of just superfluous Americans?
It's, you know, sucks to be poor in America right
now.
What if AI, you know,
makes, you know, another 1020 million redundant?
What how do we address this?
Well,
yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm more optimistic.
And I think what ends up happening is you get
these
S curves that are transformative and they never work out
exactly the way the doom and gloom people say.
And so we had that problem with automotive.
We had that problem with factories and automation in factories.
We had that problem, believe it or not,
in telecom and delivery of mail.
And so I'm a little bit more optimistic.
There's a professor at Oxford by the name of Nick
Bostrom.
You may know who he is.
He wrote the very famous
2001 memo about are we or are we not in
a simulation?
He has a brand new book
coming out right now. I interviewed him on my podcast
and he's talking about what could be a deep utopia
where you do have the people that are
been displaced, but there's enough productivity in the economy where
they're getting the universal income that Andrew's talking about.
And all of a sudden people are actually,
in a weird way, happier.
And so that that is quite possible.
I'll just leave you with two quick things.
Tom Malthus said in the 1840s we were going to
starve.
He left out all the technology,
the exponential technology of more people dying from obesity related
illnesses and starvation.
In 1985 at Tufts University had a professor tell me
we were out of oil.
Some of us in this room are old enough to
remember peak oil theory.
Oil gonna lose. Lose the oil.
In 2010, we have more oil than we know what
to do with
and so I don't believe the gloom and doomers when
it comes to people and innovation.
I believe that we are problem solvers,
and if we get the right leadership,
moral leadership in government and in politics,
we can solve these problems.
Yeah. And I think it's important to be optimistic.
You're not the only one who has a view.
Vinod Khosla, who I think we saw in Laguna Beach,
predicts that we got to a point where you all
have to work if you want to.
And let's hope it works out that way.
Oh, yeah. I, I think that vision of abundance is
possible if you had a functional government.
And then I'll just leave it at that,
leaving out the hard part.
We got to touch crypto because inside we all like
it.
Probably half through him hates it.
But there's, you know, a giant crypto campaign,
you know, vote crypto. And I know my reporter Leo
is like,
there's only one person who's going to vote based on
crypto.
But, you know, maybe not.
Do you think like we saw this movement in the
Senate today.
Do you think crypto could affect the election at the
margins?
Oh, yeah. I mean, this,
this election is going to get decided by a razor
thin margin in probably 3 states.
And the margin last time was,
let's call it 60,000 votes in three states.
So Can you imagine that being swayed by some people
staying at home because of something that that
you know, they don't like the president's stance on or
crypto
or any other another number of other micro variables?
I mean, 50,000 in a country of
330 million is not many,
but it's certainly a much smaller number than our crypto
enthusiasts
at, at various in various parts of the country.
And some of those interest groups are
spending money, you know, so it,
it could easily be a tipping,
tipping factor. You know, here's what I would say
if you read crypto Twitter or X to use your
deal,
I don't think it's a huge deal,
but I do agree with Andrew on the margin.
It could stop young voters from voting for somebody
that's anti crypto. So I would just say if you
looked at a Nash game theory analysis,
it would probably be better for you
to be pro crypto because you're not going to lose
any voters being pro crypto,
but you may lose some
not being crypto. But I'll just submit this to you.
There's a movie, there's two movies playing at your local
cinema
in November on Election Day.
One is Weekend at Bernie's.
OK, we know that know that,
right? And the other one is 1 Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest.
OK, so you can choose between an elderly guy that's
somewhat forgetful
or a lunatic that needs a lobotomy.
OK, I'm going with the elderly guy somewhat for forgetful.
Fair enough. OK, let's, let's send in a high note
backstage. Anthony was telling me he he he was.
He offered his names for
KMF. Ask your neighbor. If you don't know those,
stand for it. But apparently it's the New York Post.
You can't do it again on stage to look it
up.
But it was it was a good answer.
But let's end with I already did it.
Yeah, very, very. OK. Quickly,
Anthony, how far the Knicks going to go?
All right, so I'm an eternal optimist and I've been
waiting for three.
I've been waiting for three decades.
So I'm going to say all the way.
But here's the thing, easy applause line,
man. But here's the thing.
If they don't go all the way this year,
I think they actually have the chemistry in place for
next year with a couple of changes.
So I'm very happy, very optimistic.
All right. And my my last serious question.
Name someone in finance in the finance industry in New
York,
you admire morally and as this sort of accomplished financial
professional professional,
you want to go first.
I mean, there, there, there are a number,
but I suppose given the context of where we are,
I like and admire Mike Novogratz.
I think he's his own freaking human being.
He has his own judgment.
He's made calls that have been right,
wrong, popular, unpopular, but he's a stand up,
genuine human being.
So I, I love my so since that was already
taken,
I'll say Larry Fink and I'll just say this.
The smartest people, when they get something wrong
or they get new facts,
they changed their mind. And Larry Fink was very negative
on Bitcoin and crypto.
He spent the time and the energy and he moved
towards Bitcoin and he had the most successful ETF launch
in history this year with his Bitcoin ETF.
And a sign of great leadership is
getting things wrong, taking risks,
being able to admit that you got something wrong and
adapt and pivoting.
And I think Larry represents that.
OK, we're out of time.
Thank you. Gentlemen, Please give it up for Andrew Yang.
Thank you.